I. Introduction
1.1 Generalcharacteristics of the work
Before making the investigation inour qualification work we should give some notions on its organizationstructure.
1. Theme of qualification work.
The theme of my qualification worksounds as following: “Women images in Shakespeare’s comedies” I have chosenthis theme as in my opinion the role of a Woman in society is difficult tooverestimate and it was Shakespeare who first took the role of women in highrank among the writors of Middle Age literary Reneissanse in Great Britain. Andin comedies it is most obviously showed all the opositions of a woman’scharacter.
2. Actuality of the theme.
The real actual character is based onthe thesis that all Shakespeare’s works remain up-to-day even though they hadbeen writen more than three centuries ago! They do not only teach us all thebest features of a women’s character but also shows us the worst which we,women, have. All these, both good and evil, we still have. One more actualcharacter lies in purely linguistic features:The Great Bard introduced morethan 10000 new English words and not in the last degree it concerns theadjectives which Shakespeare used when characterizing women in his comedies.
3. The tasks and aims of the work.
Before the beginning of writing ourqualification work we set the following tasks and aims before ourselves:
1. To analyze the moral values shownin the plays.
2. To investigate the peculiaritiesof feminine characterization in Shakespeare’s comedies.
3. To analyze the nature of authorsapproach to women characters in different stages of his life.
4. To show the ways how the heroesare related to each other by finding out oppositions and correspondencesbetween men and women.
4. The novelty of the work.
We consider that the novelty of thework is revealed in new materials of the linguists which were published in theInternet.
5. Practical significance of thework.
In our opinion the practicalsignificance of our work is hard to be overvalued. This work reflects moderntrends in linguistics and we hope it would serve as a good manual for those whowants to master modern English language by classical language of WilliamShakespeare.
6. Ways of scientific investigationused within the work.
The main method for compiling ourwork is the method of comparative analysis, translation method and the methodof statistical research.
7. Fields of amplification.
The present work might find a goodway of implying in the following spheres:
1. In High Schools and scientificcircles of linguistic kind it can be successfully used by teachers andphilologists as modern material for writing research works dealing with WilliamShakespeare
2. It can be used by teachers ofschools, lyceums and colleges by teachers of English as a practical manual forteaching english literature.
3. It can be useful for everyone whowants to enlarge his/her knowledge in English.
8. Linguists worked with the theme.
As the base for our qualificationwork we used the works of a distinguished Russian linguists Dmitry Urnov andthe noted British philologist Alfred Bates[1].
9. Content of the work.
The present qualification workconsists of four parts: introduction, the main part, conclusion andbibliography. It also includes the appendix where some interesting Internetmaterials, tables, schemes and illustrative thematic materials were gathered. Withinthe introduction part, which includes two items we gave the brief descriptionof our qualification work (the first item) and gave general notion of the lifeand creative heritage of William Shakespeare. The main part of ourqualification work includes ten thematic items. There we discussed suchproblems as the role of women in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the tratment om womenin such significant tragedies as “Hamlet”, “Othello” and “Antony andCleopatra”. We also discussed the peculiar femine characters as Ophelia,Gertruda and Juliet. Moreover, some supporting women parts in Shakespeare’stragedies which are not so well-known were taken into consideration in the mainpart. To this part we refered the images of Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet”,Cornelia and Cymbeline. In conclusion to our qualification work we studied theproblem of understanding texts of Shakespeare as the language of the latter isnot always clear for modern readers. In the very end of the work we gave thebibliography list of authors, the works of whom we used when compiling thepresent qualification work. In bibliography part we mentioned more than 20sources of which were used while compiling the present work. It includes linguisticbooks and articles dealing with the theme, a number of used dictionaries andencyclopedias and also some internet sources. Appendices to our work includesome interesting information on Shakespeare and his works.
2.1 The Genius of Shakespeare
«He was not of an age, but for all time.» So wroteBen Jonson in his dedicatory verses to the memory of William Shakespeare in1623, and so we continue to affirm today. No other writer, in English or in anyother language, can rival the appeal that Shakespeare has enjoyed. And no oneelse in any artistic endeavor has projected a cultural influence as broad or asdeep.
Shakespeare's words and phrases have become so familiar to usthat it is sometimes with a start that we realize we have been speakingShakespeare when we utter a cliche such as «one fell swoop» or«not a mouse stirring.» Never mind that many of the expressions wehear most often--«to the manner born,» or (from the same speech inHamlet) «more honored in the breach than the observance»--aremisapplied at least as frequently as they are employed with any awareness oftheir original context and implication. The fact remains that Shakespeare'svocabulary and Shakespeare's cadences are even more pervasive in our ordinarydiscourse today than the idiom of the King James Bible, which Bartlett lists asonly the second most plentiful source of Familiar Quotations.
And much the same could be said of those mirrors of ournature, Shakespeare's characters. From small delights like Juliet's Nurse, orBottom the Weaver, or the Gravedigger, to such incomparable creations as Falstaff,King Lear, and Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare has enlarged our world by imitatingit. It should not surprise us, therefore, that personalities as vivid as thesehave gone on, as it were, to lives of their own outside the dramatic settingsin which they first thought and spoke and moved. In opera alone there areenough different renderings of characters and scenes from Shakespeare's playsto assure that the devotee of Charles-Francois Gounod or Giuseppe Verdi,Richard Wagner or Benjamin Britten, could attend a different performance everyevening for six months and never see the same work twice. Which is not tosuggest, of course, that the composers of other musical forms have been remiss:Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, HectorBerlioz, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Sergey Prokofiev,and Aaron Copland are but a few of the major figures who have given us songs,tone poems, ballets, symphonic scores, or other compositions based onShakespeare. Cole Porter might well have been addressing his fellow composerswhen he punctuated Kiss Me Kate with the advice to «Brush Up YourShakespeare.»
Certainly the painters have never needed such reminders.Artists of the stature of George Romney, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, EugeneDelacroix, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti havedrawn inspiration from Shakespeare's dramatis personae; and, thanks to suchimpresarios as the eighteenth-century dealer John Boydell, the rendering ofscenes from Shakespeare has long been a significant subgenre of pictorial art.Illustrators of Shakespeare editions have often been notable figures in theirown right: George Cruikshank, Arthur Rackham, Rockwell Kent, and Salvador Dali.Meanwhile, the decorative arts have had their Wedgwood platters with picturesfrom the plays, their Shakespeare portraits carved on scrimshaw, their AnneHathaway's Cottage tea cozies, their mulberry-wood jewelry boxes, and theirSuperbard T-shirts.
Every nation that has a theatrical tradition is indebted toShakespeare, and in language after language Shakespeare remains the greatestliving playwright. Not merely in terms of the hundreds of productions ofShakespeare's own plays to be blazoned on the marquees in any given year,either: no, one must also bear in mind the dozens of film and televisionversions of the plays, and the countless adaptations, parodies, and spinoffsthat accent the repertory--from musicals such as The Boys from Syracuse (basedon The Comedy of Errors) and West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein's New Yorkghetto version of the gang wars in Romeo and Juliet), to political lampoonslike Macbird (contra LBJ) and Dick Deterred (the doubly punning anti-Nixonpolemic), not to mention more reflective dramatic treatments such as EdwardBond's Bingo (a «biographical drama» about Shakespeare the man) andTom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (an absurdist re-enactmentof Hamlet from the perspective of two innocents as bewildered by the court ofRenaissance Elsinore as their twentieth-century counterparts would be in a playsuch as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot).
When we broaden our survey to include the hundreds of novels,short stories, poems, critical appreciations, and other works of seriousliterature that derive in one way or another from Shakespeare, we partake of aneven grander view of the playwright's literary and cultural primacy. Here inAmerica, for example, we can recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's awestruck response tothe Stratford seer, his exclamation that Shakespeare was «inconcievablywise,» all other great writers only «conceivably.» On the otherside of the coin, we can indulge in the speculation that Shakespeare may haveconstituted an aspect of the behemoth that obsessed Herman Melville'simagination, thus accounting for some of the echoes of Shakespearean tragedy inthe form and rhetoric of Moby-Dick. In a lighter vein, we can chuckle at thefrontier Bardolatry so hilariously exploited by the Duke and the King in MarkTwain's Huckleberry Finn. Or, moving to our own century, we can contemplateWilliam Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as an extended allusion to Macbeth's«tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow» soliloquy. Should we be disposedto look elsewhere, we can puzzle over «the riddle of Shakespeare» inthe meditations of the Argentine novelist and essayist Jorge Luis Borges. Orsmile (with perhaps but an incomplete suspension of disbelief) as the NobelPrize-winning African poet and dramatist Wole Soyinka quips that «SheikhZpeir» must have had some Arabic blood in him, so faithfully did hecapture the local color of Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra.
Implicit in all of these manifestations of Shakespeareworship is a perception best summed up, perhaps, in James Joyce's rendering ofthe charismatic name: «Shapesphere.» For in showing «the veryage and body of the time his form and pressure» (as Hamlet would put it),Shakespeare proved himself to be both the «soul of the age» his worksreflected and adorned and the consummate symbol of the artist whose poeticvisions transcend their local habitation and become, in some mysterious way,contemporaneous with «all time» (to return once more to Jonson'seulogy). If Jan Kott, a twentieth-century existentialist from eastern Europe,can marvel that Shakespeare is «our contemporary,» then, histestimony is but one more instance of the tendency of every age to claimShakespeare as its own. Whatever else we say about Shakespeare, in other words,we are impelled to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that, preeminent aboveall others, he has long stood and will no doubt long remain atop a pedestal (torecall a recent New Yorker cartoon) as «a very very very very very veryimportant writer.»
So important, indeed, that some of his most zealous admirershave paid him the backhand compliment of doubting that works of such surpassinggenius could have been written by the same William Shakespeare who lies buriedand memorialized in Stratford-upon-Avon. Plays such as the English historieswould suggest in the writer an easy familiarity with the ways of kings, queens,and courtiers; hence their author must have been a member of the nobility,someone like Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Plays such asJulius Caesar, with their impressive display of classical learning, wouldindicate an author with more than the «small Latin and less Greek»that Ben Jonson attributes to Shakespeare; hence the need to seek for theirtrue begetter in the form of a university-trained scholar such as FrancisBacon. Or so would urge those skeptics (whose numbers have included suchredoubtable personages as Henry James and Sigmund Freud) who find themselves insympathy with the «anti-Stratfordians.» Their ranks have never beenparticularly numerous or disciplined, since they have often quarreled amongthemselves about which of the various «claimants»--the Earl of Derby,Christopher Marlowe, even Queen Elizabeth herself--should be upheld as the«true Shakespeare.» And because many of their arguments aremethodologically unsophisticated, they have never attracted adherents fromscholars with academic credentials in the study of English Renaissance historyand dramatic literature. But, whatever their limitations, theanti-Stratfordians have at least helped keep us mindful of how frustratinglylittle we can say for certain about the life of the man whose works have soenriched the lives of succeeding generations.
II. The Main Part
1.2 Some words on Shakespeare’s biography
One thing we do know is that if Shakespeare was a man for alltime, he was also very much a man of his own age. Christened at Holy TrinityChurch in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564, he grew up as the eldest offive children reared by John Shakespeare, a tradesman who played anincreasingly active role in the town's civic affairs as his business prospered,and Mary Arden Shakespeare, the daughter of a gentleman farmer from nearbyWilmcote. Whether Shakespeare was born on 23 April, as tradition holds, is notknown; but a birth date only a few days prior to the recorded baptism seemseminently probable, particularly in view of the fear his parents must have hadthat William, like two sisters who had preceded him and one who followed, mightdie in infancy. By the time young William was old enough to begin attendingschool, he had a younger brother (Gilbert, born in 1566) and a baby sister(Joan, born in 1569). As he attained his youth, he found himself with two morebrothers to help look after (Richard, born in 1574, and Edmund, born in 1580),the younger of whom eventually followed his by-then-prominent eldest brother toLondon and the theater, where he had a brief career as an actor before hisuntimely death at twenty-seven.
The house where Shakespeare spent his childhood stoodadjacent to he wool shop in which his father plied a successful trade as aglover and dealer in leather goods and other commodities. Before moving toStratford sometime prior to 1552 (when the records show that he was fined forfailing to remove a dunghill from outside his house to the location where refusewas normally to be deposited), John Shakespeare had been a farmer in theneighboring village of Snitterfield. Whether he was able to read and write isuncertain. He executed official documents, not with his name, but with a crosssignifying his glover's compasses. Some scholars interpret this as a«signature» that might have been considered more«authentic» than a full autograph; others have taken it to be anindication of illiteracy. But even if John Shakespeare was not one of the«learned,» he was certainly a man of what a later age would callupward mobility. By marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's landlord,he acquired the benefits of a better social standing and a lucrativeinheritance, much of which he invested in property (he bought several houses).And by involving himself in public service, he rose by sure degrees to thehighest municipal positions Stratford had to offer: chamberlain (1561),alderman (1565), and bailiff (or mayor) and justice of the peace (1568). A fewyears after his elevation to the office of bailiff, probably around 1576, JohnShakespeare approached the College of Heralds for armorial bearings and theright to call himself a gentleman. Before his application was acted upon,however, his fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse, and it was not until1596, when his eldest son had attained some status and renewed the petition,that a Shakespeare coat of arms was finally granted. This must have been acomfort to John Shakespeare in his declining years (he died in 1601), becauseby then he had borrowed money, disposed of property out of necessity, ceased toattend meetings of the town council, become involved in litigation and beenassessed fines, and even stopped attending church services, for fear, it wassaid, «of process for debt.» Just what happened to alter JohnShakespeare's financial and social position after the mid 1570s is not clear.Some have seen his nonattendance at church as a sign that he had become arecusant, unwilling to conform to the practices of the newly established Churchof England (his wife's family had remained loyal to Roman Catholicism despitethe fact that the old faith was under vigorous attack in Warwickshire after1577), but the scant surviving evidence is anything but definitive.
The records we do have suggest that during young William'sformative years he enjoyed the advantages that would have accrued to him as theson of one of the most influential citizens of a bustling market town in thefertile Midlands. When he was taken to services at Holy Trinity Church, hewould have sat with his family in the front pew, in accordance with hisfather's civic rank. There he would have heard and felt the words and rhythmsof the Bible, the sonorous phrases of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, the exhortationsof the Homilies. In all likelihood, after spending a year or two at a«petty school» to learn the rudiments of reading and writing, hewould have proceeded, at the age of seven, to «grammar school.» Givenhis father's social position, young William would have been eligible to attendthe King's New School, located above the Guild Hall and adjacent to the GuildChapel (institutions that would both have been quite familiar to a man with theelder Shakespeare's municipal duties), no more than a five-minute walk from theShakespeare house on Henley Street. Though no records survive to tell us whoattended the Stratford grammar school during this period, we do know that ithad well-qualified and comparatively well-paid masters; and, through the painstakingresearch of such scholars as T. W. Baldwin, we now recognize that a curriculumsuch as the one offered at the King's New School would have equipped its pupilswith what by modern standards would be a rather formidable classical education.
During his many long school days there, young Shakespearewould have become thoroughly grounded in Latin, acquired some background inGreek, and developed enough linguistic facility to pick up whatever he may havewanted later from such modern languages as Italian and French. Along the way hewould have become familiar with such authors as Aesop, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust,Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca. He would have studied logic andrhetoric as well as grammar, and he would have been taught the principles of compositionand oratory from the writings of such masters as Quintilian and Erasmus. In allprobability, he would even have received some training in speech and dramathrough the performance of plays by Plautus and Terence. If Shakespeare'sreferences to schooling and schoolmasters in the plays are a reliable index ofhow he viewed his own years as a student, we must conclude that the experiencewas more tedious than pleasurable. But it is difficult to imagine a moresuitable mode of instruction for the formation of a Renaissance poet'sintellectual and artistic sensibility.
Meanwhile, of course, young Shakespeare would have learned agreat deal from merely being alert to all that went on around him. He wouldhave paid attention to the plant and animal life in the local woods that hewould later immortalize, in As You Like It, as the Forest of Arden. He may havehunted from time to time; one legend, almost certainly apocryphal, has it thathe eventually left Stratford because he had been caught poaching deer from theestate of a powerful squire, Sir Thomas Lucy, four miles up-stream. He probablylearned to swim as a youth, skinny-dipping in the river Avon. He may haveparticipated in some of the athletic pursuits that were the basis ofcompetition in the Elizabethan equivalent of the Olympics, the nearby CotswoldGames. He would undoubtedly have been adept at indoor recreations such ashazard (a popular dice game), or chess, or any of a number of card games. As hegrew older, he would have become accustomed to such vocations as farming,sheep-herding, tailoring, and shopkeeping. He would have acquired skills suchas fishing, gardening, and cooking. And he would have gathered informationabout the various professions: law, medicine, religion, and teaching. Judgingfrom the astonishing range of daily life and human endeavor reflected in hispoems and plays, we can only infer that Shakespeare was both a voracious readerand a keen observer, the sort of polymath Henry James might have beendescribing when he referred to a character in one of his novels as «a manon whom nothing was lost.»
Once his school years ended, Shakespeare married, ateighteen, a woman who was eight years his senior. We know that Anne Hathawaywas pregnant when the marriage license was issued by the Bishop of Worcester on27 November 1582, because a daughter, Susanna, was baptized in Holy Trinity sixmonths later on 26 May 1583. We have good reason to believe that the marriagewas hastily arranged: there was only one reading of the banns (a churchannouncement preceding a wedding that allowed time for any legal impedimentsagainst it to be brought forward before the ceremony took place), an indicationof unusual haste. But whether the marriage was in any way «forced» isimpossible to determine. Some biographers (most notably Anthony Burgess) havemade much of an apparent clerical error whereby the bride's name was entered asAnne Whateley of Temple Grafton in the Worcester court records; these writersspeculate that Shakespeare was originally planning to marry another Anne untilAnne Hathaway of Shottery (a village a mile or so from Shakespeare's home inStratford) produced her embarrassing evidence of a prior claim. To mostscholars, including our foremost authority on Shakespeare's life, S. Schoenbaum,this explanation of the Anne Whateley court entry seems farfetched. Suchhypotheses are inevitable, however, in the absence of fuller information aboutthe married life of William and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare.
What we do have to go on is certainly compatible with thesuspicion that William and Anne were somewhat less than ardent lovers. They hadonly two more children--the twins, Hamnet and Judith, baptized on 2 February1585--and they lived more than a hundred miles apart, so far as we can tell, forthe better part of the twenty-year period during which Shakespeare was employedin the London theater. If we can give any credence to an amusing anecdoterecorded in the 1602-1603 diary of a law student named John Manningham, therewas at least one occasion during those years when Shakespeare, overhearing theactor Richard Burbage make an assignation, «went before, was entertained,and at his game before Burbage came; then, message being brought that Richardthe Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that Williamthe Conqueror was before Richard the Third.» If we read the sonnets as inany way autobiographical, moreover, we are shown a poet with at least one othersignificant liaison: a «Dark Lady» to whom Will's lust impels himdespite the self-disgust the affair arouses in him (and despite her infidelitywith the fair «Young Man» to whom many of the poems are addressed andfor whom the poet reserves his deepest feelings).
But even if there is reason to speculate that Shakespeare maynot have always been faithful to the marriage bed, there is much to suggestthat he remained attached to Anne as a husband. In 1597 he purchased one of themost imposing houses in Stratford--New Place, across the street from the GuildChapel--presumably settling his wife and children there as soon as the title tothe property was clear. He himself retired to that Stratford home, so far as wecan determine, sometime between 1611 and 1613. And of course he remembered Annein his will, bequeathing her the notorious «second-best bed»--whichmost modern biographers regard as a generous afterthought (since a third of hisestate would have gone to the wife by law even if her name never occurred inthe document) rather than the slight that earlier interpreters had read intothe phrasing.
Naturally we would like to know more about what Shakespearewas like as a husband and family man. But most of us would give just as much toknow what took place in his life between 1585 (when the parish register showshim to have become the father of twins) and 1592 (when we find the earliestsurviving reference to him as a rising star in the London theater). What did hedo during these so-called «dark years»? Did he study law, as somehave suspected? Did he travel on the Continent? Did he become an apprentice toa butcher, as one late-seventeenth-century account had it? Or--most plausibly,in the view of many modern biographers--did he teach school for a while? All wecan say for certain is that by the time his children were making their own wayto school in rural Stratford, William Shakespeare had become an actor andwriter in what was already the largest city in Europe.
Shakespeare probably traveled the hundred miles to London byway of the spires of Oxford, as do most visitors returning from Stratford toLondon today. But why he went, or when, history does not tell us. It has beenplausibly suggested that he joined an acting troupe (the Queen's Men) that wasone player short when it toured Stratford in 1587. If so, he may have migratedby way of one or two intermediary companies to a position with the troupe thatbecame the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. The only thing we can assert withany assurance is that by 1592 Shakespeare had established himself as an actorand had written at least three plays. One of these--the third part of HenryVI--was alluded to in that year in a posthumously published testament by aonce-prominent poet and playwright named Robert Greene, one of the«University Wits» who had dominated the London theater in the late1580s. Dissipated and on his deathbed, Greene warned his fellow playwrights tobeware of an «upstart crow» who, not content with being a mereplayer, was aspiring to a share of the livelihood that had previously been theexclusive province of professional writers such as himself. Whether Greene'sGroatsworth of Wit accuses Shakespeare of plagiarism when it describes him as«beautified with our feathers» is not clear; some scholars haveinterpreted the phrase as a complaint that Shakespeare has borrowed freely fromthe scripts of others (or has merely revised existing plays, a practice quitecommon in the Elizabethan theater). But there can be no doubt that Greene'sanxieties signal the end of one era and the beginning of another: a golden age,spanning two full decades, during which the dominant force on the London stagewould be, not Greene or Kyd or Marlowe or even (in the later years of thatperiod) Jonson, but Shakespeare.
2.2 Introducing words to Shakespeare’s Comedy
The Comedy of Errors – first pure comedy
If Shakespeare's earliest efforts in the dramatization ofhistory derived from his response to the political climate of his day, hisfirst experiments in comedy seem to have evolved from his reading in school andfrom his familiarity with the plays of such predecessors on the English stageas John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. Shakespeare'sapprentice comedies are quite «inventive» in many respects,particularly in the degree to which they «overgo» the conventions anddevices the young playwright drew upon. But because they have more precedentbehind them than the English history plays, they strike us now as lessstunningly «original»--though arguably more successfullyexecuted--than the tetralogy on the Wars of the Roses.
Which of them came first we do not know, but most scholarsincline toward The Comedy of Errors, a play so openly scaffolded upon Plautus'sMenaechmi and Amphitruo (two farces that Shakespeare probably knew in Latinfrom his days in grammar school) that one modern critic has summed it up as«a kind of diploma piece.» Set, ostensibly, in the Mediterranean cityfamiliar from St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, the play begins with asentence on the life of a luckless Syracusan merchant, Aegeon, who has stumbledinto Ephesus in search of his son Antipholus. After narrating a tale of woethat wins the sympathy of the Duke of Ephesus, Aegeon is given till five in theafternoon to come up with a seemingly impossible ransom for his breach of anarbitrary law against Syracusans. Meanwhile, unknown to Aegeon, the object ofhis search is in Ephesus too, having arrived only hours before him; Antipholushad set out some two years earlier to find a twin brother by the same name whowas separated from the rest of the family in a stormy shipwreck more thantwenty years in the past. By happy coincidence, the other Antipholus has longsince settled in Ephesus, and so (without either's knowledge) has their mother,Aegeon's long-lost wife, Aemilia, who is now an abbess. To complicate mattersfurther, both Antipholuses have slaves named Dromio, also twins long separated,and of course both sets of twins are indistinguishably appareled. Into this mixShakespeare throws a goldsmith, a set of merchants, a courtesan, a wife and asister-in-law for the Ephesian Antipholus, and a conjuring schoolmaster. Theresult is a swirling brew of misunderstandings, accusations, and identitycrises--all leading, finally, to a series of revelations that reunite a family,save Aegeon's life, and bring order to a city that had begun to seem bewitchedby sorcerers.
The Comedy of Errors reached print for the first time in the1623 First Folio. We know that it was written prior to 28 December 1594,however, because there is record of a performance on that date at one of thefour Inns of Court. Some scholars believe that the play was written for thatholiday Gray's Inn presentation, but most tend to the view that it had beenperformed previously, possibly as early as 1589 but more likely in the years1592-1594. Most critics now seem agreed, moreover, that for all its farcicalelements, the play is a comedy of some sophistication and depth, with asensitivity to love that anticipates Shakespeare's great comedies later in thedecade: when Luciana advises her sister Adriana about how she should treat herhusband Antipholus, for example, she echoes Paul's exhortations on Christianmarriage in Ephesians. And with its use of the devices of literary romance (theframe story of Aegeon comes from Apollonius of Tyre), The Comedy of Errors alsolooks forward to the wanderings, confusions of identity, and miraculousreunions so fundamental to the structure of «late plays» such asPericles and The Tempest.
3.2 “The Taming of the Shrew” the first femininecomedy
What may have been Shakespeare's next comedy has also beendeprecated as farce, and it is frequently produced today with stagingtechniques that link it with the commedia del l'arte popular in RenaissanceItaly. But for all its knockabout slapstick, The Taming of the Shrew is toopenetrating in its psychology and too subtle in its handling of the nuances ofcourtship to be dismissed as a play deficient in feeling. Its main event is abattle of the sexes in which Petruchio, who has «come to wive it wealthilyin Padua,» takes on a dare no other potential suitor would even consider:to win both dowry and docility from a sharp-tongued shrew avoided as«Katherine the curst.» Apparently recognizing that Katherine'swillfulness is a product of the favoritism her father has long bestowed uponher younger sister, and having the further good sense to realize that the fieryKate is capable of becoming a much more attractive wife than themuch-sought-after but rather devious Bianca, Petruchio mounts a brilliantcampaign to gain Kate's love and make her his. First, he insists that Kate isfair and gentle, notwithstanding all her efforts to disabuse him of thatnotion. Second, he «kills her in her own humour,» with a display ofarbitrary behavior--tantrums, scoldings, peremptory refusals--that both wearsher down and shows her how unpleasant shrewishness can be. At the end of theplay Petruchio shocks his skeptical fellow husbands by wagering that his bridewill prove more obedient than theirs. When Kate not only heeds his commands butreproaches her sister and the other wives for «sullen, sour»rebellion against their husbands, it becomes manifest that Petruchio hassucceeded in his quest: Kate freely and joyfully acknowledges him to be her«loving lord.» If we have doubts about whether Kate's transformationcan be accepted as a «happy ending» today--and alterations of thefinal scene in many recent productions would suggest that it may be toooffensive to current sensibilities to be played straight--we should perhaps askourselves whether the Kate who seems to wink conspiratorially at Petruchio asshe puts her hands beneath his foot to win a marital wager is any less spiritedor fulfilled a woman than the Kate who drives all her wouldbe wooers away inthe play's opening scene.
Whether or not The Taming of the Shrew is the mysteriousLove's Labor's Won referred to by Francis Meres in 1598, it seems to have beenwritten in the early 1590s, because what is now generally believed to be a badquarto of it appeared in 1594. The Taming of a Shrew differs significantly fromthe version of Shakespeare's play that was first published in the 1623Folio--most notably in the fact that the drunken tinker Christopher Sly, whoappears only in the induction to the later printing of the play, remains onstage throughout The Taming of a Shrew, repeatedly interrupting the action ofwhat is presented as a play for his entertainment and resolving at the end togo off and try Petruchio's wife-taming techniques on his own recalcitrantwoman. Some directors retain the later Sly scenes, but no one seriouslyquestions that the Folio text is in general the more authoritative of the twoversions of the play.
4.2 The Two Gentlemen of Verona based on Feminine Work
The Folio provides the only surviving text of The TwoGentlemen of Verona, a comedy so tentative in its dramaturgy (for example, itsineptitude in the few scenes where the playwright attempts to manage more thantwo characters on the stage at once), and so awkward in its efforts to pit theclaims of love and friendship against each other, that many scholars now thinkit to be the first play Shakespeare ever wrote. Based largely on a 1542chivalric romance (Diana Enamorada) by Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor,The Two Gentlemen of Verona depicts a potential rivalry between twofriends--Valentine and Proteus--who fall in love with the same Milanese woman(Silvia) despite the fact that Proteus has vowed his devotion to a woman(Julia) back home in Verona. Proteus engineers Valentine's banishment fromMilan so that he can woo Silvia away from him. But Silvia remains faithful toValentine, just as Julia (who has followed her loved one disguised as his page)holds true to Proteus, notwithstanding the character he discloses as a man wholives up to his name. In the concluding forest scene Valentine intervenes tosave Silvia from being raped by Proteus; but, when Proteus exhibits remorse,Valentine offers him Silvia anyway, as a token of friendship restored.Fortunately, circumstances conspire to forestall such an unhappy consummation,and the play ends with the two couples properly reunited.
Unlike The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, TheTwo Gentlemen of Verona has never been popular in the theater, even though itoffers two resourceful women (whose promise will be fulfilled more amply insuch later heroines as Rosalind and Viola), a pair of amusing clowns (Launceand Speed), and one of the most engaging dogs (Crab) who ever stole a stage. Inits mixture of prose and verse, nevertheless, and in its suggestion that the«green world» of the woods is where pretensions fall and would beevildoers find their truer selves, The Two Gentlemen of Verona looks forward tothe first fruits of Shakespeare's maturity: the «romantic comedies»of which it proves to be a prototype.
Titus Andronicus
The one remaining play that most critics now locate in theperiod known as Shakespeare's apprenticeship is a Grand Guignol melodrama thatseems to have been the young playwright's attempt to outdo Thomas Kyd's SpanishTragedy (produced circa 1589) in its exploitation of the horrors of madness andrevenge. The composition of Titus Andronicus is usually dated 1590-1592, and itseems to have been drawn from a ballad and History of Titus Andronicus thatonly survives today in an eighteenth-century reprint now deposited in theFolger Shakespeare Library. (The Folger also holds the sole extant copy of the1594 first quarto of Shakespeare's play, the authoritative text for all but theone scene, III.ii, that first appeared in the 1623 Folio.) If Shakespeare didtake most of his plot from the History of Titus Andronicus, it is clear that healso went to Ovid's Metamorphoses (for the account of Tereus's rape ofPhilomena, to which the tongueless Lavinia points to explain what has been doneto her) and to Seneca's Thyestes (for Titus's fiendish revenge on Tamora andher sons at the end of the play).
Although Titus Andronicus is not a «history play,»it does make an effort to evoke the social and political climate of fourth-centuryRome; and in its depiction of a stern general who has just sacrificed more thantwenty of his own sons to conquer the Goths, it anticipates certaincharacteristics of Shakespeare's later «Roman plays»: JuliusCaesar,Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. But it is primarily as anantecedent of Hamlet (influenced, perhaps, by the so-called lost Ur-Hamlet)that Titus holds interest for us today. Because whatever else it is, TitusAndronicus is Shakespeare's first experiment with revenge tragedy. Its primaryfocus is the title character, whose political misjudgments and fiery temper puthim at the mercy of the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, and her two sons (Demetriusand Chiron). They ravish and mutilate Titus's daughter Lavinia, manipulate theEmperor into executing two of Titus's sons (Martius and Quintus) asperpetrators of the crime, and get Titus's third son (Lucius) banished fortrying to rescue his brothers. Along the way, Tamora's Moorish lover Aarontricks Titus into having his right hand chopped off in a futile gesture to saveMartius and Lucius. After Lavinia writes the names of her assailants in thesand with her grotesque stumps, Titus works out a plan for revenge: he slitsthe throats of Demetrius and Chiron, invites Tamora to a banquet, and servesher the flesh of her sons baked in a pie. He then kills Tamora and dies at thehands of Emperor Saturninus. At this point Lucius returns heading a Gothic armyand takes over as the new Emperor, condemning Aaron to be half-buried and leftto starve and throwing Tamora's corpse to the scavenging birds and beasts.
As Fredson Bowers has pointed out, Titus Andronicusincorporates a number of devices characteristic of other revenge tragedies: theprotagonist's feigned madness, his delay in the execution of his purpose, hisawareness that in seeking vengeance he is taking on a judicial function thatproperly rests in God's hands, and his death at the end in a bloody holocaustthat leaves the throne open for seizure by the first opportunist to arrive uponthe scene.
5.2 Character of Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Affectation of another kind is depicted in a delightful scenefrom what many regard as Shakespeare's most charming comedy, A MidsummerNight's Dream. As the Athenian courtiers are quick to observe in theircritiques of the «tragical mirth» of Pyramus and Thisby in V.i, the«mechanicals» who display their dramatic wares at the nuptial feastof Theseus and Hippolyta are even more fundamentally «o'erparted»than the hapless supernumeraries of Love's Labor's Lost. But there is somethingdeeply affectionate about Shakespeare's portrayal of the affectations of Bottomand his earnest company of «hempen home-spuns,» and the«simpleness and duty» with which they tender their devotion is theplaywright's way of reminding us that out of the mouths of babes and fools cansometimes issue a loving wisdom that «hath no bottom.» Like«Bottom's Dream,» the playlet brings a refreshingly naive perspectiveto issues addressed more seriously elsewhere. And, by burlesquing the strugglesand conflicts through which the lovers in the woods circumvent thearbitrariness of their elders, «Pyramus and Thisby» comments not onlyupon the fortunes of Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia, but also uponthe misfortunes of Romeo and Juliet. After all, both stories derive ultimatelyfrom the same source in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare's parallelrenderings of the «course of true love» in Romeo and Juliet and AMidsummer Night's Dream are so closely linked in time and treatment that it istempting to regard the two plays as companion pieces--tragic and comic masks,as it were, for the same phase (1595-1596) of Shakespearean dramaturgy.
Whether or not A Midsummer Night's Dream was commissioned fora wedding ceremony at Whitehall, as some scholars have speculated, the play isin fact a remarkable welding of disparate materials: the fairy lore of Oberonand Titania and their impish minister Puck, the classical narrative ofTheseus's conquest of the Amazons and their queen Hippolyta, the confusedcomings and goings of the young Athenian lovers who must flee to the woods toevade their tyrannical parents, and the rehearsals for a crude craft play by aband of well-meaning peasants. It is in some ways the most original work in theentire Shakespearean canon, and one is anything but surprised that its«something of great constancy» has inspired the best efforts of suchlater artists as composer Felix Mendelssohn, painters Henry Fuseli and WilliamBlake, director Peter Brook, and filmmakers Max Reinhardt and Woody Allen.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is in many respects the epitome of«festive comedy,» an evocation of the folk rituals associated withsuch occasions as May Day and Midsummer Eve, and its final mood is one ofunalloyed romantic fulfillment. Romance is also a key ingredient in theconcluding arias of Shakespeare's next comedy, The Merchant of Venice, whereBassanio and Portia, Lorenzo and Jessica, and Gratiano and Nerissa celebratethe happy consummation of three love quests and contemplate the music of thespheres from a magical estate known symbolically as Belmont. But the«sweet harmony» the lovers have achieved by the end of The Merchantof Venice has been purchased very dearly, and it is hard for a modern audienceto accept the serenity of Belmont without at least a twinge of guilt over whathas happened in far-off Venice to bring it about.
The Merchant of Venice
Whether The Merchant of Venice is best categorized as ananti-Semitic play (capitalizing on prejudices that contemporaries such asMarlowe had catered to in plays like The Jew of Malta) or as a play about theevils of anti-Semitism (as critical of the Christian society that haspersecuted the Jew as it is of the vengeance he vents in response), its centraltrial scene is profoundly disturbing for an audience that has difficultyviewing Shylock's forced conversion as a manifestation of mercy. Shylock's «hathnot a Jew eyes» speech impels us to see him as a fellow humanbeing--notwithstanding the rapacious demand for «justice» that allbut yields him Antonio's life before Portia's clever manipulations of the lawstrip the usurer of his own life's fortune--so that even if we feel that theJew's punishment is less severe than what strict «justice» might havemeted out to him, his grim exit nevertheless casts a pall over the festivitiesof the final act in Belmont.
By contrast with A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play in whichthe disparate components of the action are resolved in a brilliantly satisfyingsynthesis, The Merchant of Venice remains, for many of us, a prototype of thoselater Shakespearean works that twentieth-century critics have labeled«problem comedies.» Even its fairy-tale elements, such as the casketscenes in which three would-be husbands try to divine the «will» ofPortia's father, seem discordant to a modern audience that is asked to admire aheroine who dismisses one of her suitors with a slur on his Moroccan«complexion.» Though it seems to have been written in late 1596 orearly 1597 and, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, was first published in a goodquarto in 1600, The Merchant of Venice feels closer in mood to Measure forMeasure--which also pivots on a conflict between justice and mercy--than tomost of the other «romantic comedies» of the mid to late 1590s.
The Merry Wifes of Windsor
The first good text of a related play, The Merry Wives ofWindsor, also appeared in the Folio, but it too was initially published in abad quarto, this one a memorial reconstruction dated 1602. Just when MerryWives was written, and why, has been vigorously debated for decades. Accordingto one legend, no doubt apocryphal but not totally lacking in plausibility,Shakespeare was commissioned to write the play because the Queen wanted to seeFalstaff in love. If so, it seems likely that the play was also produced as anoccasional piece in honor of the award of the Order of the Garter to LordHunsdon, the patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on 23 April 1597. There arereferences to a Garter ceremony at Windsor Castle in act five of The MerryWives of Windsor, and Leslie Hotson has argued that even though the play maywell have been performed later at the Globe, its first presentation was beforeQueen Elizabeth and Lord Hunsdon at Windsor on St. George's Day 1597.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is unique among Shakespeare'scomedies in having an English town for its setting. Its bourgeois charactershave delighted audiences not only in the playhouse but also on the operaticstage, in what many critics consider the most successful of Verdi's numerousachievements in Shakespearean opera. Despite its obvious charms, however, theplay has never been a favorite among Shakespeare's readers and literaryinterpreters. The reason is that the Falstaff we see in The Merry Wives ofWindsor is a Falstaff largely lacking in the vitality and appeal of thecharacter we come to love in the first part of Henry IV. Without Prince Hal andthe wit combats afforded by his jokes at Falstaff's expense, the Falstaff ofMerry Wives is merely conniving and crude. We may laugh at the comeuppances hereceives at the hands of the merry wives he tries to seduce--the buck-basketbaptism he gets as his reward for the first encounter, the beatings andpinchings he suffers in his later encounters--but we see nothing of theinventiveness that makes Falstaff such a supreme escape artist in part 1 ofHenry IV. So attenuated is the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor that manyinterpreters have argued that it is simply a mistake to approach him as thesame character. In any case, we never see him in love. His is a profit motivewithout honor, and it is much more difficult for us to feel any pity for hisplight in Merry Wives than it is in the three Henry plays that depict thepratfalls and decline of the young heir-apparent's genial lord of misrule.
The play does have the clever Mistress Ford and MistressPage. And in the jealous Master Ford and the tyrannical Master Page it also hasa pair of comic gulls whose sufferings can be amusing in the theater. But it isdoubtful that The Merry Wives of Windsor will ever be among our favoriteShakespearean comedies, particularly when we examine it alongside such contemporaryachievements as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It.
Much Ado about Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It were probablywritten in late 1598 and 1599, respectively, with the former first published ina good quarto in 1600 and the later making its initial appearance in the 1623First Folio. Both are mature romantic comedies, and both have enjoyedconsiderable success in the theater.
«Nothing» is a word of potent ambiguity inShakespeare (the playwright was later to explore its potential most profoundlyin the «nothing will come of nothing» that constitutes the essence ofKing Lear), and in Much Ado About Nothing its implications include thepossibilities inherent in the wordplay on the Elizabethan homonym «noting.»Through the machinations of the surly Don John, who gulls the superficialClaudio into believing that he «notes» his betrothed Hero in the actof giving herself to another lover, an innocent girl is rejected at the altarby a young man who believes himself to have been dishonored. Fortunately, DonJohn and his companions have themselves been noted by the most incompetentwatch who ever policed a city; and, despite their asinine constable, Dogberry,these well-meaning but clownish servants of the Governor of Messina succeed inbringing the crafty villains to justice. In doing so, they set in motion aprocess whereby Hero's chastity is eventually vindicated and she reappears asif resurrected from the grave. Meanwhile, another pair of «notings»have been staged by the friends of Benedick and Beatrice, with the result thatthese two sarcastic enemies to love and to each other are each tricked intobelieving that the other is secretly in love. At least as much ado is made ofBenedick and Beatrice's notings as of the others, and by the time the play endsthese acerbic critics of amorous folly, grudgingly acknowledging that «theworld must be peopled,» have been brought to the altar with Claudio andHero for a double wedding that concludes the play with feasting and merriment.
Shakespeare could have drawn from a number of antecedents forthe story of Hero and Claudio, among them cantos from Ariosto's Orlando Furiosoand Spenser's Faerie Queene. But the nearest thing to a «source» forBeatrice and Benedick may well have been his own The Taming of the Shrew,whether another pair of unconventional would-be lovers struggle their way to arelationship that is all the more vital for the aggressive resistance that hasto be channeled into harmony to bring it about. In any event, if there is somedoubt about where Benedick and Beatrice came from, there is no doubt about thedirection in which they point--to such gallant and witty Restoration lovers asMirabell and Millamant in William Congreve's The Way of the World.
As You Like It
With As You Like It Shakespeare achieved what manycommentators consider to be the finest exemplar of a mode of romantic comedybased on escape to and return from what Northrop Frye has termed the«green world.» As in A Midsummer Night's Dream (where the young loversflee to the woods to evade an Athens ruled by the edicts of tyrannical fathers)and The Merchant of Venice (where Belmont serves as the antidote to all thevenom that threatens life in Venice), in As You Like It the well-disposedcharacters who find themselves in the Forest of Arden think of it as anenvironment where even «adversity» is «sweet» andrestorative.
Duke Senior has been banished from his dukedom by a usurpingyounger brother, Duke Frederick. As the play opens, Duke Senior and his partyare joined by Orlando and his aged servant Adam (who are running away fromOrlando's cruel older brother Oliver), and later they in turn are joined byDuke Senior's daughter Rosalind and her cousin Celia (who have come to theforest, disguised as men, because the wicked Duke Frederick can no longer bearto have Rosalind in his daughter's company at court). The scenes in the forestare punctuated by a number of reflections on the relative merits of courtlypomp and pastoral simplicity, with the cynical Touchstone and the melancholyJaques countering any sentimental suggestion that the Forest of Arden is a«golden world» of Edenic perfection, and her sojourn in the forestallows the wise and witty Rosalind to use male disguise as a means of testingthe affections of her lovesick wooer Orlando. Eventually Orlando proves aworthy match for Rosalind, in large measure because he shows himself to be hisbrother's keeper. By driving off a lioness poised to devour the sleepingOliver, Orlando incurs a wound that prevents him from appearing for anappointment with the disguised Rosalind; but his act of unmeritedself-sacrifice transforms his brother into a «new man» who arrives onthe scene in Orlando's stead and eventually proves a suitable match for Celia.Meanwhile, as the play nears its end, we learn that a visit to the forest hashad a similarly regenerative effect on Duke Frederick, who enters a monasteryand returns the dukedom to its rightful ruler, Duke Senior.
As You Like It derives in large measure from Thomas Lodge'sromance Rosalynde or Euphues' Golden Legacy, a prose classic dating from 1590.But in his treatment of the «strange events» that draw the play to aconclusion presided over by Hymen, the god of marriage, Shakespeare hints atthe kind of miraculous transformation that will be given major emphasis in thelate romances.
Twelth Night
The last of the great romantic comedies of Shakespeare's midcareer, probably composed and performed in 1601 though not published until the1623 First Folio, was Twelfth Night. Possibly based, in part, on an Italiancomedy of the 1530s called Gl'Ingannati, Twelfth Night is another play withimplicit theological overtones. Its title comes from the name traditionallyassociated with the Feast of Epiphany (6 January, the twelfth day of theChristmas season), and much of its roistering would have seemed appropriate toan occasion when Folly was allowed to reign supreme under the guise of a Feastof Fools presided over by a Lord of Misrule. In Shakespeare's play, thecharacter who represents Misrule is Sir Toby Belch, the carousing uncle of ahumorless countess named Olivia. Together with such companions as Sir AndrewAguecheek, the jester Feste, and a clever gentlewoman named Maria, Sir Tobymakes life difficult not only for Olivia but also for her puritan stewardMalvolio, whose name means «bad will» and whose function in the play,ultimately, is to be ostracized so that «good will» may prevail. Inwhat many consider to be the most hilarious gulling scene in all ofShakespeare, Malvolio is tricked into thinking that his Lady is in love withhim and persuaded to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings in herpresence--attire that he believes will allure her, but attire that persuadesher instead that he is deranged. The «treatment» that follows is amock exercise in exorcism, and when Malvolio is finally released from histormentors at the end of the play, he exits vowing revenge «on the wholepack» of them.
As with the dismissal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,the punishment of Malvolio's presumption in Twelfth Night has seemed too harshto many modern viewers and readers. But that should not prevent us from seeingthat Twelfth Night is also a play about other forms of self-indulgence (CountOrsino's infatuation with the pose of a courtly lover, and Olivia's excessivelylong period of mourning for her deceased brother) and the means by whichcharacters «sick of self-love» or self-deception are eventuallyrestored to mental and emotional sanity. Through the ministrations of the wisefool, Feste, and the providential Viola, who arrives in Illyria after ashipwreck in which she mistakenly believes her brother Sebastian to have died,we witness a sequence of coincidences and interventions that seems too nearlymiraculous to have been brought about by blind chance. By taking another seriesof potentially tragic situations and turning them to comic ends, Shakespearereminds us once again that harmony and romantic fulfillment are at the root ofwhat Northrop Frye calls the «argument of comedy.»
All’s Well that Ends Well
Modern in another sense may be a good way to describe All'sWell That Ends Well. After a long history of neglect, this tragicomedy hasrecently enjoyed a good deal of success in the theater and on television, andone of the explanations that have been given is that it features a heroine who,refusing to accept a preordained place in a hierarchical man's world, does whatshe has to do to win her own way.
Orphaned at an early age and reared as a waiting-gentlewomanto the elegant and sensitive Countess of Rossillion, Helena presumes to fall inlove with the Countess's snobbish son Bertram. Using a cure she learned fromher dead father, who had been a prominent physician, Helena saves the life ofthe ailing King of France, whereupon she is rewarded with marriage to the manof her choice among all the eligible bachelors in the land. She astonishesBertram by selecting him. Reluctantly, Bertram consents to matrimony, butbefore the marriage can be consummated he leaves the country with hisdisreputable friend Parolles, telling Helena in a note that he will be hersonly when she has fulfilled two presumably impossible conditions: won back thering from his finger and borne a childe to him. Disguised as a pilgrim, Helenafollows Bertram to Florence. There she substitutes herself for a woman namedDiana, with whom Bertram has made an assignation, and satisfies the despicableBertram's demands.
One of the «problems» that have troubled critics ofAll's Well That Ends Well is the device of the «bed trick.» But wenow know that Shakespeare had biblical precedent for such a plot (Genesis 35)and that it was associated in the Old Testament with providential intervention.Which may be of some value to us in dealing with the other major issues: whyshould Helena want so vain and selfish a man as Bertram in the first place, andhow can we accept at face value his reformation at the end? If we suspend ourdisbelief enough to grant the fairy-tale premises of the plot (which derivedfrom a story in Boccaccio's Decameron,) we should be able to grant as well thatin a providentially ordered world, the end may not only justify the means butsanctify them. And if the end that Helena has in view is not only to winBertram but to make him «love her dearly ever, ever dearly,» we mustgrant the playwright the final miracle of a Bertram who can be brought to seehis evil ways for what they are and repent of them.
Measure for Measure
A similar miracle would seem to be the final cause of Measurefor Measure. At the beginning of the play, Duke Vincentio, noting that he hasbeen too lenient in his administration of the laws of Venice, appoints asdeputy an icy-veined puritan named Angelo, whom he expects to be more severefor a season of much-needed civic discipline. Almost immediately upon theDuke's departure, Angelo finds himself confronted with a novitiate, Isabella,who, in pleading for the life of a brother condemned for fornification,unwittingly arouses the new deputy's lust. Angelo offers her an exchange: herbrother's life for her chastity. Astonished by the deputy's disregard for bothGod's laws and man's, Isabella refuses. Later, as she tries to prepare Claudiofor his execution and discovers that he is less shocked by the deputy's offerthan his sister had been, Isabella upbraids him, too, as a reprobate.
At this point the Duke, who has been disguised as a friar,persuades Isabella to «accept» Angelo's offer on the understandingthat his former betrothed, Mariana, will sleep with him instead. Once again thebed trick proves effectual and «providential.» In the«trial» that takes place at the entrance to the city upon the Duke'sreturn, Isabella accuses Angelo of having corrupted his office and executed herbrother despite an agreement to spare him (an order of the deputy's that,unknown to Isabella, has been forestalled by the «friar»). But then,in response to Mariana's pleas for her assistance, she decides not to press herclaim for justice and instead kneels before the Duke to beg that Angelo's lifebe spared. The Duke grants her request, and Angelo--illustrating Mariana'sstatement that «best men are molded out of faults»--repents andaccepts the Duke's mercy.
Measure for Measure qualifies as a tragicomedy because thequestions it raises are serious (how to balance law and grace, justice andmercy, in human society) and the issue (whether or not Angelo will be executedfor his evil intentions with respect to Claudio) is in doubt until the momentwhen, by kneeling beside Mariana, Isabella prevents what might have been a kindof revenge tragedy. (The Duke tells Mariana, «Against all sense you doimportune her./Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact,/Her brother's ghosthis paved bed would break,/And take her hence in horror.») In Shakespeareancomedy, of course, all's well that ends well. Revenge gives way to forgivenessor repentance, and characters who might have died in self-deception or guiltare given a second chance. As for Isabella, she too gains insight andsensitivity as a consequence of her trials, and at the conclusion of the playshe finds herself the recipient of a marriage proposal from her previouslydisguised counselor, the Duke. Whether she accepts it, and if so how, hasbecome one of the chief «problems» to be solved by directors andactors in modern productions.
The Empowerment of Women in Shakespearean Comedy[2]
In Shakespeare’s comedies, many – possibly even most — of thefemale characters are portrayed as being manipulated, if not controlledoutright, by the men in their lives: fathers, uncles, suitors, husbands. Andyet, there are women inhabiting Shakespeare’s comedic world who seem to enjoy agreater degree of autonomy and personal power than one would expect in apatriarchal society. Superficially, therefore, Shakespeare’s comedies appear tosend mixed signals regarding the notion of female empowerment. Some women arestrong and independent, others are completely submissive, and the behavior ofeither seems to be influenced more by theme or plot than by any qualitieswithin the characters themselves.
A closer look, though, should make it evident that this isnot the case; as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, appearances can be deceiving. Insome cases, the exterior behavior is a deliberate faзade to mask the character’s realfeelings; in others, it is an acculturated veneer that is burned away as aresult of the play’s events. Despite their outward appearances, though, most ofthese comedic women belong to one of two opposing archetypes. An examination ofthese archetypes allows the reader to see past such deceptions to the realpersonality beneath.
The “Daughter” and “Niece” Archetypes
Within Shakespeare’s comedies, many of the female charactersare portrayed as submissive and easily controlled. Like dutiful daughters,these women submit to patriarchal repression with little complaint.
Perhaps the best example of a “daughter” character inShakespearean comedy is the role of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. Hero iscompletely under the control of her father Leonato, especially with regard tocourtship. When, in Act Two, Leonato believes that Don Pedro may seek Hero’shand in marriage, he orders Hero to welcome the prince’s advances despite thedifference in their ages:
“Daughter, remember what I told you.
If the Prince do solicit you in that kind,
you know your answer” (II.i.61-3).
Thus we see that Leonato controls not only Hero’s actions,but even her words as well.
In fact, Hero is so thoroughly repressed by themale-dominated society in which she lives that she submits not only to herfather’s will, but to that of nearly every other man in the play. She is easilywooed and won by Don Pedro posing as Claudio (II.i.80-93). She is just aseasily undone in a single speech when Claudio pronounces her an adulteress(IV.i.30-41). Even Don John, through his nefarious schemes, is able tomanipulate Hero, very nearly to her death. Despite the influence of the moreliberated Beatrice in her life, Hero shows no sign of acting under her ownvolition anywhere in the play.
Unlike Hero, however, other female characters inShakespeare’s comedies do not submit easily to the will of a patriarchal character,or indeed, that of any man. Just as Much Ado About Nothing presents us, inHero, with the very model of a dutiful “daughter” character, so it delineatesthe archetypical “niece” character, the quick-witted Beatrice. The “merry war”(I.i.58) she wages with Benedick may showcase her character to best advantage,but it is clear from the first scene of the play that Beatrice does not easilysubmit to the commands or beliefs of any man.
In fact, it often seems that Beatrice would liberate hercousin Hero from patriarchal repression as well. While virtually every maincharacter in the play is conspiring to arrange Hero’s marriage, Beatricecounsels Hero to follow her own desires, despite contemporary custom:
[I]t is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy and say, “Father, asit please you.” But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, orelse make another curtsy and say, “Father, as it please me” (II.i.49-52).
Beatrice’s willfulness continues even through the final sceneof the play. Despite her earlier vows to requite Benedick’s love(III.i.109-16), when he at last proposes, she makes sure to emphasize that theyare to be married only because she agrees, not because he wills it(V.iv.72-95).
The “Daughter”/“Niece” Binary in The Taming of the Shrew
Although Kate is (literally speaking) a daughter to thepatriarchal figure Baptista, she seldom submits to her father’s authority, inmatters of behavior or of courtship. She therefore fits better with the willful“niece” characters than she does with the obedient “daughter” types; thearchetype is informed by the behavioral, not familial, relationship. It isKate’s disobedience – her “niece” behavior — that provides the impetus for theplay’s action.
By contrast, Kate’s sister Bianca is presented as a “daughter”character throughout most of the play:
“[W]hat you will command me will I do
So well I know my duty” (II.i.6-7).
Even the play’s minimal stage directions emphasize Bianca’ssubmissive nature: Bianca enters and exits scenes only at the behest of a malecharacter (or Kate, in Act II and again in Act V). Her subjugation to herfather is especially evident with regard to her potential suitors: Baptistaproclaims in his first lines that Bianca may not be courted until Kate ismarried (I.i.49-51). Bianca, in fact, is outwardly so submissive that she evenprofesses to be willing to stand aside and allow Kate her choice of Bianca’smany suitors (II.i.10-18).
The final scene of the play, however, reverses thesearchetypal characterizations completely. Once married to Lucentio, Biancaimmediately becomes willful and disobedient, refusing to respond to his summons(V.ii.79-85). Kate, on the other hand, comes dutifully when Petruchio calls forher (99-104). At his request, she fetches Bianca, and delivers her long speechregarding wifely duty (140-183).
This final scene demonstrates that the “daughter” and “niece”characterizations are actually masks that each sister has used to obtain thesort of husband each desires. Bianca poses as a dutiful, obedient “daughter” toattract a husband of means; once she has done so, she can drop the faзade and become the pampered, petulantchild she has always been. Kate, on the other hand, wields her “shrewishness”to rid herself of suitors whom she cannot respect. When Petruchio resolves towed her anyway, she realizes that he is just the sort of husband she can behappy with, and so becomes a loving, obedient wife (whether to please him, orbecause that is the sort of relationship she desires). It is fitting, in a playso concerned with disguise, that both Kate and Bianca exercise power byexploiting the guises provided by their respective archetypes.
The “Daughter”/“Niece” Binary in As You Like It
The “daughter” and “niece” archetypes, of course, are notuniversally applicable to all women in Shakespeare’s comedies. In As You LikeIt, there are other female characters which defy such classification. Phoebe,for example, exhibits traits of both “niece” (in her willful pursuit of theerstwhile Ganymede) and “daughter” (as when she readily submits to Ganymede’sstipulation that she marry Silvius), while the country wench Audrey cannoteasily be assigned to either category. Still, the archetypes once again proveuseful in an examination of the relative empowerment of the play’s centralfemale characters, Rosalind and Celia.
On the surface, Rosalind appears to be one of the mostindependent, and thus empowered, women in any of Shakespeare’s works. LikeBeatrice with Benedick, Rosalind is able to dictate completely the terms of herrelationship with Orlando; throughout most of the play, he obeys her every whim– and this despite his belief that she is only a simulacrum of Rosalind. In atime when marriage was customarily (judging by the texts) a businessarrangement between the groom and the bride’s father, Rosalind actuallyarranges her own union with Orlando, albeit in disguise (V.iv.5-10); further,she even arranges the marriage of Silvius and Phoebe (V.ii, V.iv.11-25). Thedramatic irony of this chain of circumstances, in fact, is the basis for theplay’s comedic action: Ganymede, who exerts such control over the lives ofothers, is really a woman.
It may be contended that Rosalind gets what she wants notbecause she is a truly empowered woman, but because she poses as a man, andthat before adopting this disguise, she has no agency. Duke Frederick, to whomRosalind is a literal as well as archetypical niece, robs her of control overher own fate when he summarily banishes her from his court (I.iii.39-87). Yeteven here we can see that Rosalind already possesses the potential to becomeempowered. When asked why she is sentenced to exile, the duke replies, “Let itsuffice thee that I trust thee not… Thou art thy father’s daughter”(I.iii.53, 56). The duke, rightly or wrongly, views Rosalind as a threat, andonly an empowered woman would pose a threat to him. Viewed in this light, themasculine disguise only unlocks the latent power that the “niece” archetypealready possesses.
Celia, on the other hand, is clearly a “daughter” character. Hersole act of volition in the entire play comes when she determines to joinRosalind in exile (I.iii.83-103), and even this one act of defiance ismotivated more by Celia’s loyalty to her cousin than by any desire of her own. When,in the play’s final act, Oliver determines to marry Celia, only Orlando isgiven any right of decision over her lot (V.ii.1-15); Celia has apparentlyconsented to be wed (l. 7), but is not really a party to the negotiations.
Thus, even while presenting a strong, independent femalecharacter, As You Like It seems to reinforce the patriarchal notion of women assubjugated beings. Rosalind exercises some control over her own destiny, butonly after she disguises herself as a man; lacking such a guise, Celia isvirtually powerless to determine her own fate. But this superficial view is aninadequate interpretation. The Ganymede disguise – indeed, the entire journeyto Arden – is the crucible that releases Rosalind’s latent personal power, butthe power has always been there; like Kate and Bianca, she has always been a“niece.” Celia remains subjugated not because she chooses to travel as a woman,but because she is, at heart, a dutiful “daughter.”
Conclusion
1.3. Having said about Shakespeare’s comedies we dare to saythat it is the most important milestone in the creative activity of him. Buteven amongst his immortal works of this kind the play “A Midsummer Night’sDream” stands in the special play. The first reason of this lies in the periodof writing of it. The play is referred to the third, last period of creativeactivity, it is seemingly summarizes the whole life of the dramatist and thedeath of the main heroes at the fourth act is a hint for the closest death ofShakespeare himself. So one another reason for the significance of the comedyfollows just after: it maybe the only work of Shakespeare where the humour andlaughter are being mixed with the tragedy. And this mixing appears on thebackground of the exact description of humans life and characters which areclosely similar to the historic chronicles. In our work we tried to demonstratethis spirit of comedy mixed with the tragedic chronicles of the author himself.
Our work aimed to show the novelity of the play though it waswritten three-four centuries ago, we tried to prove that even being a dream thenarration does not lose the real character. We made our conclusion that fairy talescannot but link with the real life and the problems of life, love, happiness,sadness, revenge exist in both at the Heavens and the Earth.
2.3. In our qualification work we tried to give some light tothe following items:
a) To show the unusual, unique compositional structure of theplay on the example of the most significant scenes of each act of the play.
b) To analyze the main themes of the play.
c) To prove the brilliant nature of the Shakespeare’slanguage.
d) To compare the different features of the main heroes intheir controversy and similarity.
Having worked on our qualification work we could do thefollowing conclusion and notes:
1) Being not volumable play it remained in our hearts as oneof the most
brilliant things created by the “Avon Bard”.
2) The main idea of the play was to show the interrelationsbetween life and dream, the different state of minds of illiterate but kind andpassionate wandering actors and foolish, cruel, envious power “handers”.
3) The main themes of the play are order and disorder, loveand marriage, appearance and reality.
4) The genius of the author is concluded in mixing andinstallation of one narration into another, assistance of prose and poetry withsingle repliques and comments.
5) The heroes of the play are not happy even having got thethings they dreamt.
In the very end of our qualification work we would like tosay that the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream ” seems to us as the mostmeaningful not only for those who is interested in Shakespeare but for the wholehumanity.
Shakespeare’s Tragicomedies and women images in them.
The Winter’s Tale (tragicomedy)
Enlightenment and contrition are prerequisite to the happyending of The Winter's Tale, too. Here again a husband falls victim to vengefuljealousy, and here again the plot builds up to the moment when he can beforgiven the folly that, so far as he knows, has brought about his innocentwife's death. Based primarily on Robert Greene's Pandosto: The Triumph of Time,a prose romance first published in 1588 and reprinted under a new title in1607, The Winter's Tale was probably completed in 1610 or 1611. Its initialappearance in print was in the 1623 Folio.
The action begins when Leontes, King of Sicilia, is seizedwith the «humour» that his wife Hermione has committed adultery withhis childhood friend Polixenes. It is abundantly clear to everyone else, mostnotably Hermione's lady-in-waiting Paulina, that Leontes' suspicions areirrational. But he refuses to listen either to the counsel of his advisers or tothe oracle at Delphi--persisting with this «trial» of Hermione untilhe has completely devastated his court. He drives Polixenes away with thefaithful Sicilian lord Camillo; he frightens to death his son Mamilius; and hepursues Hermione so unrelentingly that she finally wilts into what Paulinadeclares to be a fatal swoon. At this point, suddenly recognizing that he hasbeen acting like a madman, Leontes vows to do penance for the remainder of hislife.
Years later, after Perdita (the «lost» child whom theraging Leontes has instructed Paulina's husband Antigonus to expose to theelements) has grown up and fallen in love with Florizel, the heir to Polixenes'throne in Bohemia, the major characters are providentially regathered inLeontes' court. Leontes is reunited with his daughter. And then, in one of themost stirring and unexpected moments in all of Shakespeare's works, a statue ofHermione that Paulina unveils turns out to be the living--and forgiving--Queenwhom Leontes had «killed» some sixteen years previously. In a speechthat might well serve to epitomize the import of all the late romances, Paulinatells the King «It is requir'd/You do awake your faith.» Theregenerated Leontes embraces his long-lamented wife, bestows the widowed Paulinaon the newly returned Camillo, and blesses the forthcoming marriage of Perditato the son of his old friend Polixenes, the object of the jealousy with whichthe whole agonizing story has begun.
Tempest (tragicomedy)
The circle that is completed in The Winter's Tale has itscounterpart in The Tempest, which concludes with the marriage of Prospero'sdaughter Miranda to Ferdinand, the son of the Neapolitan king who had helpedProspero's wicked brother Antonio remove Prospero from his dukedom in Milan adozen years previously.
Like The Winter's Tale,The Tempest was completed by 1611 andprinted for the first time in the 1623 Folio. Because it refers to the«still-vext Bermoothes» and derives in part from three accounts ofthe 1609 wreck of a Virginia-bound ship called the Sea Adventure, the play haslong been scrutinized for its supposed commentary on the colonial exploitationof the New World. But if the brute Caliban is not the noble savage ofMontaigne's essay on cannibals, he is probably not intended to be an instanceof Third World victimization by European imperalism either. And Prospero'sisland is at least as Mediterranean as it is Caribbean. More plausible, butalso too speculative for uncritical acceptance, is the time-honored suppositionthat the magician's staff with which Prospero wields his power is meant to beinterpreted as an analogy for Shakespeare's own magical gifts--with thecorollary that the protagonist's abjuration of his «potent art» is thedramatist's own way of saying farewell to the theater. Were it not that atleast two plays were almost certainly completed later than The Tempest, thislatter hypothesis might win more credence.
But be that as it may, there can be no doubt that Prosperocuts a magnificent figure on the Shakespearean stage. At times, when he isrecalling the usurpation that has placed him and his daughter on the islandthey have shared with Caliban for a dozen lonely years, Prospero is reminiscentof Lear, another angry ruler who, despite his earlier indiscretions, has causeto feel more sinned against than sinning. At other times, when Prospero isusing the spirit Ariel to manipulate the comings and goings of the enemieswhose ship he has brought aground in a tempest, the once and future Duke ofMilan reminds us of the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure. But though hisinfluence on the lives of others turns out in the end to have been«providential,» Prospero arrives at that beneficent consummation onlythrough a psychological and spiritual process that turns on his forswearing«vengeance» in favor of the «rarer action» of forgiveness.Such dramatic tension as the play possesses is to be found in the audience'ssuspense over whether the protagonist will use his Neoplatonic magic for goodor for ill. And when in fact Prospero has brought the «men of sin» toa point where they must confront themselves as they are and beg forgiveness fortheir crimes, it is paradoxically Ariel who reminds his master that to be trulyhuman is finally to be humane.
Uniquely among the late tragicomic romances, The Tempest haslong been a favorite with both readers and audiences. Its ardent young lovershave always held their charm, as has the effervescent Ariel, and its treatmentof the temptations afforded by access to transcendent power gives it apolitical and religious resonance commensurate with the profundity of itsexploration of the depths of poetic and dramatic art. In the end its burdenseems to be that an acknowledgment of the limits imposed by the human conditionis the beginning of wisdom
Appendix 1
Some quotes from Shakespeare’s comedies
1 As you like it (Act V Sc. I)
JAQUES:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Ttranslation:
Жак:Весь мир – театр.
Внем женщины, мужчины – все актеры.
Уних свои есть выходы, уходы,
Икаждый не одну играет роль.
Семьдействий в пьесе той.
2 Much ado about nothing (Act V Sc. II)
CLAUDIO
Never any did so, though very many have been beside theirwit. I will bid thee draw, as we do the minstrels; draw, to pleasure us.
DON PEDRO
As I am an honest man, he looks pale. Art thou sick, orangry?
CLAUDIO
What, courage, man! What though care killed a cat, thou hastmettle enough in thee to kill care.
BENEDICK
Sir, I shall meet your wit in the career, and you charge itagainst me. I pray youchoose another subject.
Translation:
Клавдио:Этого еще никто не делал, хотя многим их остроумие вылезает боком. Мне хочетсяпопросить тебя ударить им, как мы просим музыкантов ударить в смычки. Сделаймилость, развлеки нас.
ДонПедро: Клянусь честью, он выглядит бледным – Ты болен или сердит?
Клавдио:Подбодрись дружок! Хоть говорят, что забота и кошку умудрить может, у тебятакой живой нрав, что ты можешь и заботу уморить.
Бенедикт:Синьор, я ваши насмешки поймаю на полном скаку, если они ко мнеотносятся: нельзя ли выбрать другую тему для разговора?
3 The Merchant of Venice (Act.1 Sc.3)
Antonio: The devil can gnote Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
Translation
Антонио:Заметь, Бассанио:
Внужде и чорт священный текст приводит.
Порочнаядуша, коль на святыню
Ссылается,похожа на злодея
Сулыбкой на устах иль на красивый,
Румяныйплод с гнилою сердцевиной.
О,как на вид красива ложь бывает!
4 Troilus and Cressida (Act III, Scene 2)
TROILUS You have bereft me of all words, lady.
PANDARUS Words pay no debts, give her deeds: but she'll
bereave you o' the deeds too, if she call your
activity in question. What, billing again? Here's
'In witness whereof the parties interchangeably'--
Come in, come in: I'll go get a fire.
[Exit]
CRESSIDA Will you walk in, my lord?
TROILUS O Cressida, how often have I wished me thus!
Translation Троил Милая! Тылишила меня языка.
Пандар Язык тут ни при чем. Долг платежом красен. Плохо, еслина дело не хватит сил. Так, так… опять уж нос с носом… Отлично… «Когдаобе стороны приходят ко взаимному соглашению»… и проч… и проч. Войдите,войдите в двери, а я поищу огня. (Уходит.)Крессида Угодно тебевойти, царевич?
Троил О Крессида! Как долго я томился ожиданьем этогосчастья!
5 Much ado about nothing (Act I Sc I)
Leonato:…There was never yet a philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently….
Translation
Леонато:Прошу молчи. Я только плоть и кровь.
Такогонет философа на свете,
Чтобызубную боль сносил спокойно,-
Пустьна словах подобен он богамВ своем презренье к бедам и страданьям