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C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959) Chapter One: Introduction: The Saturnalian Pattern; Chapter Two: Holiday Custom and Entertainment; Chapter Three: Misrule as Comedy; Comedy as Misrule; Chapter Ten: Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night o Aristophanic; festive structure; vice, fools and holiday; "Merry England” · Through Release to Clarification o Method: Events shape real people into holiday characters; invocation and abuse in Aristophanes; Freud on inhibition and release; Archbishop Grindal’s complaint; clarification: reconnection with nature; kill-joys as butts; satire vs. saturnalia; idealism mocked too; clarification about love; holiday’s temporary license; ‘present mirth hath present laughter’ · Shakespeare's Route to Festive
Comedy o folk culture: still in the blood but no longer in the brain; Sly in The Taming of The Shrew is this "a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick."? "it is more pleasing stuff ... a kind of history."; clowning and burlesque; Jack Cade’s rebellion; Falstaff: unending holiday: a racket; from ritual to history and professional theatre HOLIDAY
CUSTOM AND ENTERTAINMENTS o Festival Decline among Urban Puritans; Court Observance of Holiday; C. R. Baskervill modern survey of the range of native custom o King of the Bean; Holinshed on Christmas;
the Feast of Fools ; farced protocol;
Sir Thomas Urquhart’s
Disdain; Bacchus,
prince of tavern mates; Stubbes on “all
the wildheads of the parish”; procession to the churchyard; selling
my Lord of Misrule's badges; the morris dance; group dancing; Jack Cade In I Henry VI;
abuse for a craven or a kill-joy; o Chambers on the Queen’s Progress; entertainments reflect the popular tradition of seasonal holidays; Leicester's garden at Kenilworth, during the famous entertainment of 1575; mythological and pastoral materials; George Kirbye from The Triumphes of Oriana (I601) when music crept by upon the waters of a garden lake; Peele's Arraignment of Paris (1584), where the gift of the apple to the queen resolves the jealous conflict previously depicted between the rival goddesses; Elizabeth, her magic presence; mixing classical myth with local folklore; Julia in Two Gents, disguised as a page, she tells how she was chosen to play the woman's part; the Flora who gaily leads a morris described in one of Morley's madrigals; Laneham on the Bride-ale; Shakespeare’s use of the incongruity between fact and fiction, and the fun of quick transitions between the two: MISRULE AS
COMEDY; COMEDY AS MISRULE · Introduction: o Blurring the distinctions between life and art: the tendency for Elizabethan comedy to be a saturnalia, rather than to represent saturnalian experience; Aristophanic Old Comedy: Talboys Dymoke and fellows lampoon the avaricious Earl of Lincoln in "The Death of the Lord of Kyme" on the "May pole green" before Sir Edward's house (from Star Chamber testimony) o A direct development of comedy out of festivity, such as may have happened in Greece, was prevented in Elizabethan England by the existence of an already developed dramatic literature-- and by the whole moral superstructure of Elizabethan society. When the issue was put to the test, license for festive abuse was never granted by Elizabethan officials. · License and Lese
Majesty in Lincolnshire o Disruption: When majesty in lords is dangerous to meddle with, to act "My Lord of Misrule" or be created one of his retainers says "We are as good as Lords" and at the same time, "Lords are no better than we." ; John Taylor the water-poet describes London apprentices rioting on Shrove Tuesday; “Tim Tatters, a most valiant villain…” o The custom of misrule obviously provided a whirligig that could catch up simmering antagonisms and swing them into the open. The Earl of Lincoln's almost insane avarice and inhumanity were repeatedly a problem to the Privy Council and a plague to his neighborhood. o Sir Arthur Georges, in a letter written to Sir Robert Cecil in 1600: “His wickedness, misery, craft, repugnance to all humanity, and perfidious mind is not among the heathens to be matched.” o Sir Edward's younger brother Talboys, who lived in the Dymoke household, was just the sort of free-wheeling wildhead to come into collision with the Earl. "Commend me, sweetheart, to My Lord of Lincoln...and tell him that he is an ass and a fool ... Is he my uncle and hath no more wit?"… o Summer of 1601: the Earl’s complaint to the Star Chamber about these “disgraceful, false, and intolerable slanders, reproaches, scandalous words, libels, and irreligious profanations” o Star Chamber testimony: "some of the company had reeds tied together like spears, with a painted paper off the tops of them, and one of them had a drum and another a flag." They "did march on horseback two and two together through the streets ... to one Miles his house, who kept an alehouse" They had a drum and flag, so … to make a goodly amount of noise… There was indignant denial of their having declared that "they had drunk the town of Coningsby ... dry"… o When the Earl happened by, he was foolish enough to undertake to face down a mummery Lord. They “answered with great oaths that they had a Lord as good as he [the Lord of Misrule], and … cried aloud, 'Strike up drums! Strike up drums!” The Earl's henchman Pigott tried to intervene… a "heavy, corpulent man"… o Then, on the last Sunday in August, Talboys Dymoke "did frame and make a stage play to be played in for sport and merriment at the setting up of a Maypole in South Kyme"… "Talboys Dymoke… did counterfeit the person of (the Earl) and his speeches and gesture, and then… fetched away by ... Roger Bayard, who acted ... the Devil... wh did declare his last will and testament and ... did bequeath his wooden dagger to ... the Earl of Lincoln, [followed by a dirge [a ragman’s roll] sung by Talboys Dymoke ... and other the ... actors ... wherein they expressed by name most of the known lewd and licentious women and after every of their names, ora pro nobis." o The defense of the Dymoke party was that the play was traditional, a part of the games, with no allusions to the Earl. Dymoke "of himself termed (it) the Death of the [Summer] Lord of Kyme. o Henry Machyn’s diary entry on a London procession marking the death of the Lord of Misrule. o Talboys’ mock funeral sermon: John Cradock the elder ... in frown of religion, and the profession thereof, being attired in a minister's gown and having a corner cap on his head, and a book in his hand opened, did ... in a pulpit made for that purpose, deliver and utter a profane and irreligious prayer o "the book of Mab" includes a merry tale that fits the holiday mood of rebuking niggardliness and, broadly, the proposition that knaves are honest men: the Boy who uses magic to triumph over his begrudging Stepmother and her ally the Friar, thanks to the magic of a kind stranger with whom he shares his food; by the magic, it happens that whenever the Stepmother glares at the Boy, she involuntarily and thunderously breaks wind; moreover, whenever the Boy plays on a magic pipe, everybody, however malicious, has to dance o posting of a bill of defiance by Talboys Dymoke o 1610 the Star Chamber handed down a judgment in Lincoln's favor: whipping, public humiliations, ruinous fines and impressment into the Fleet: typical discontinuity between what would be tolerated in the festive liberties of settled local groups who did not need to fear mirth, and what would be made of these same liberties if they came to be brought before the highly moral royal council or before a court: constant vigilance was needed to cope with things done "in frown of religion" and in contempt of "respective and due observance of the nobles." o In 1564, a group of ardently Protestant Cambridge men, disappointed in their hope of performing a satire before Elizabeth as part of the festivities of her Cambridge visit, staged a lampoon of the mass. She was outraged and left the hall. Earlier in her reign, though, Elizabeth had sanctioned for the first masque of her reign, on Twelfth Night, 1559, a masquerade of crows, asses, and wolves as cardinals, bishops, and abbots. But 1559 was, within limits, a revolutionary moment, and saturnalia, within limits, could serve it. Thereafter… the precarious religious settlement made religion an area where the authorities were particularly vigilant to exclude temporary, festive revolutions for fear that they might lead on to permanent revolutionary consequences. · The May Game of Martin Marprelate o Dover Wilson: the gifted Puritan satirist who
masqueraded as Martin Marprelate
used a humorous
style which was "that of the stage monologue ... , with asides to
the audience and a variety of 'patter' in the form of puns, ejaculations and
references to current events and persons of popular rumor” o Francis Bacon,
writing in the year of the controversy, deplored "this immodest and
deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion
are handled in the style of the stage." o Pasquill of England: mock knighting of boon
companions; Opponents are sometimes spoken of-- or to-- as though they were a
Vice or clown, or other stock figure of the stage or the games; Martin on the
stage, probably as the subject for jigs or other brief afterpieces:
"to make a May game" of somebody implies that one need only bring
an antagonist into
the field of force of
May games to make him
ridiculous. o Pamphlet: The
May game of Martinism: “Martin himself is the Maid Marian, trimly
dressed up in a cast gown, and
a kercher of Dame Lawson's, his face handsomely muffied with a
diaper napkin to cover his beard, and a great nosegay in his hand, of the principalest
flowers I could gather out of all his works”… the wooing of a bearded Maid
Marian… o Gabriel Harvey: “the
bishops have descended to Martin's level”… Pasquill:
“the Vetus
Comoedia began to prick him at London in the right vein, when she brought forth
Divinity with a scratched face” ala Aristophanes' Peace: "she hath been so long in
the country" seems to imply that the sort of drastic ad hominem ridicule practiced on
Martin had come to be confined to the frank country world o But instead of welcoming the players' help against the government's Puritan opponent, the Master of the Revels arranged for Burghley to permit the stage's enemy, the Lord Mayor, to prohibit all theatrical exhibitions.
Chapter 6: May Games and Metamorphosis on a Misdsummer Night Chapter 10: Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night · Introduction: o First Performance: Don Virginio Orsino's account; John Manningham’s diary account of the Middle Temple's feast on February 2, 1602; Source: Rich's Apolonius and Silla; language as gesture o Not only is Malvolio nearly driven mad, but all the others approach that frenzied state due to mistaken identities; Olivia’s madness; The farcical challenge and “fight” between Viola and Sir Andrew; Sebastian and Olivia; Orsino’s fury o The play’s action realizes dynamically general distinctions and tendencies in life: the difference between men and women, Olivia's infatuation with Cesario-Viola; Sebastian’s manly reflex: nature to her bias drew; Antonio and Sebastian’s ardent friendship; Orsino and Cesario’s love ; patience on a monument; o Viola’s talent: courtesy; Object lessons in lack of courtesy: Sir Andrew, the would-be-reveller who is comically inadequate; Sir Toby is the sort of kinsman who would take the lead at such Christmas feasts as Sir Edward Dymoke patronized in Lincolnshire; Music in Twelfth Night: the "old and antique song" crystallizes the play's central feeling for freedom in heritage and community; the taut, restless, elegant court, where people speak a nervous verse, and the free-wheeling household of Olivia, where people live in an easy-going prose: Maria: a function of the life of "the house"; Feste chiefly sings and begs-- courtly occupations-- and radiate in his songs and banter a feeling of liberty based on accepting disillusion. "What's to come is still unsure ... Youth's a stuff will not endure" o Viola commands effortlessly, when there is occasion, Shakespeare's mature poetic power vs. Malvolio’s puffed up pretension: Malvolio has been called a satirical portrait of the Puritan spirit, and there is some truth in the notion. But he is not hostile to holiday because he is a Puritan; he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday; He is a man of business, and, it is passingly suggested, a hard one; he is or would like to be a rising man, and to rise he uses sobriety and morality. o Twelfth Night and other problem plays: Troilus and Cressida; Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well; the fool in Twelfth Night has been over the garden wall into some such world as the Vienna of Measure for Measure; Feste’s final song; compare to Hamlet;
INTRODUCTION: THE SATURNALIAN PATTERN Messenger. Your honour's
players, hearing your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy ... -Induction to The
Taming of the Shrew Much comedy is festive-- all comedy, if the word festive is pressed far enough. But much of Shakespeare's comedy is festive in a quite special way which distinguishes it from the art of most of his contemporaries and successors. The part of his work which I shall be dealing with in this book, the merry comedy written up to the period of Hamlet and the problem plays, is of course enormously rich and wide in range; each new play, each new scene, does something fresh, explores new possibilities. But the whole body of this happy comic art is distinguished by the use it makes of forms for experience which can be termed saturnalian. Once Shakespeare finds his own distinctive style, he is more Aristophanic than any other great English comic dramatist, despite the fact that the accepted educated models and theories when he started to write were Terentian and Plautine. The Old Comedy cast of his work results from his participation in native saturnalian traditions of the popular theater and the popular holidays. Not that he "wanted art"-- including Terentian art. But he used the resources of a sophisticated theater to express, in his idyllic comedies and in his clowns’ (3) ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release. "Festive" is usually an adjective for an atmosphere, and the word describes the atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedy from Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream through Henry IV and Twelfth Night. But in exploring this work, "festive" can also be a term for structure. I shall be trying to describe structure to get at the way this comedy organizes experience. The saturnalian pattern appears in many variations, all of which involve inversion, statement and counterstatement, and a basic movement which can be summarized in the formula, through release to clarification. So much of the action in this comedy is random when looked at as intrigue, so many of the persons are neutral when regarded as character, so much of the wit is inapplicable when assessed as satire, that critics too often have fallen back on mere exclamations about poetry and mood. The criticism of the nineteenth century and after was particularly helpless, concerned as it was chiefly with character and story and moral quality. Recent criticism, concerned in a variety of ways with structure, has had much more to say. No figure in the carpet is the carpet. There is in the pointing out of patterns something that is opposed to life and art, an ungraciousness which artists in particular feel and resent. Readers feel it too, even critics: for every new moment, every new line or touch, is a triumph of opportunism, something snatched in from life beyond expectation and made design beyond design. And yet the fact remains that it is as we see the design that we see design outdone and brought alive. O body swayed to
music, O brightening glance, To get at the form and meaning of the plays, which is my first and last interest, I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops [ 4 ] underlying configurations
in the social life of a culture.
The saturnalian pattern came to
Shakespeare from many sources, both in social and artistic tradition. It appeared
in the theatrical institution of clowning: the clown or Vice, when
Shakespeare started to write, was a recognized anarchist who made aberration
obvious by carrying release to absurd extremes. The cult of fools and folly,
half social and half literary, embodied a similar polarization of experience.
One could formulate the saturnalian pattern effectively by referring first to these
traditions: Shakespeare's first completely masterful comic scenes were
written for the clowns.1 But the
festival occasion provides the clearest paradigm. It can illuminate not
only those comedies where Shakespeare drew largely and directly on holiday
motifs, like Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, but also plays where
there is relatively little direct use of
holiday, notably As You Like It and Henry IV. We can get hold of the spirit of Elizabethan holidays because they had form. "Merry England" was merry chiefly by virtue of its community observances of periodic sports and feast days. Mirth took form in morris-dances, sword-dances, wassailings, mock ceremonies of summer kings and queens and of lords of misrule, mummings, disguisings, masques-- and a bewildering variety of sports, games, shows, and pageants improvised on traditional models. Such pastimes were a regular part of the celebration of a marriage, of the village wassail or wake, of Candlemas, Shrove Tuesday, Hocktide, May Day, Whitsuntide, Midsummer Eve, Harvest-home, Halloween, and the twelve days of the Christmas season ending with Twelfth Night. Custom prescribed, more or less definitely, some ways of making merry at each occasion. The seasonal feasts were not, as now, rare curiosities to be observed by folklorists in remote villages, but landmarks framing the 1 Miss Enid Welsford
includes perceptive treatments of Shakespeare's 'fools in relation to
tradition in her fine study, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New
York, n.d. [r 93 5]). Professor Willard
Farnham
characterizes Shakespeare's
grotesque or fool comedy in relation to Erasmus and More and the mediaeval
feeling for man's natural imperfection in
''The Mediaeval Comic Spirit in the English
Renaissance, Joseph Quincy A dams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway
et al. (Washington,
D.C., 1948), pp.
429-439. The use
of mediaeval elements for comic counterstatement is described in C. L.
Barber, "The Use of Comedy in As You Like
It,'' PQ, XXI (1942),
353-367, an early version of Ch. 9 below. (5) cycle of the year, observed with varying degrees of sophistication by most elements in the society. Shakespeare's casual references to the holidays always assume that his audience is entirely familiar with them: As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney ... as a pancake for Shrove Tuesday, a morris for May Day, as the nail to his hole ...' A great many detailed connections between the holidays and the comedies will claim our attention later, but what is most important is the correspondence between the whole festive occasion and the whole comedy. The underlying movement of attitude and awareness is not adequately expressed by any one thing in the day or the play, but is the day, is the play. Here one cannot say how far analogies between social rituals and dramatic forms show an influence, and how far they reflect the fact that the holiday occasion and the comedy are parallel manifestations of the same pattern of culture, of a way that men can cope with their life. Through
Release to Clarification Release, in the idyllic comedies, is expressed by making the whole experience of the play like that of a revel. Come, woo me, woo me! for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent. (A.Y.L. IV.i.68-69) Such holiday humor is often abetted by directly staging pastimes, dances, songs, masques, plays extempore, etc. But the fundamental method is to shape the loose narrative so that "events" put its persons in the position of festive celebrants: if they do not seek holiday it happens to them. A tyrant duke forces Rosalind into disguise; but her mock wooing with Orlando amounts to a disguising, with carnival freedom from the decorum of her identity and her sex. The misrule of Sir Toby is represented as personal idiosyncrasy, but it follows the pattern of the Twelfth Night occasion; the fighting match of Benedict and Beatrice, while appropriate to their 2 All's W. II.ii.22. Citations of
Shakespeare are to The Complete Works,
ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936). Abbreviations of titles follow the usage recommended by the Shakespeare
Quarterly. [ 6 J special characters, suggests the customs of Easter Smacks and Hocktide abuse between the sexes. Much of the poetry and wit, however it may be occasioned by events, works in the economy of the whole play to promote the effect of a merry occasion where Nature reigns. F. M. Cornford, in The Origins of Attic Comedy, suggested that invocation and abuse were the basic gestures of a nature worship behind Aristophanes' union of poetry and railing. The two gestures were still practiced in the "folly" of Elizabethan May game, harvest-home, or winter revel: invocation, for example, in the manifold spring garlanding customs, ‘gathering for Robin Hood’; abuse, in the customary license to flout and fleer at what on other days commanded respect. The same double way of achieving release appears in Shakespeare's festive plays. There the poetry about the pleasures of nature and the naturalness of pleasure serves to evoke beneficent natural impulses; and much of the wit, mocking the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, acts to free the spirit as does the ritual abuse of hostile spirits. A saturnalian attitude, assumed by a clear-cut gesture toward liberty, brings mirth, an accession of wanton vitality. In the terms of Freud's analysis of wit, the energy normally occupied in maintaining inhibition is freed for celebration. The holidays in actual observance were built around the enjoyment of the vital pleasure of moments when nature and society are hospitable to life. In the summer, there was love in out-of-door idleness; in the winter, within-door warmth and food and drink. But the celebrants also got something for nothing from festive liberty-- the vitality normally locked up in awe and respect. E.K. Chambers found among the visitation articles of Archbishop Grindal for the year I576 instructions that the bishops determine whether the ministers and churchwardens have suffered any lord of misrule or summer lords and ladies, or any disguised persons, or others, in Christmas or at May games, or any morris dancers, or at any other times, to come unreverently into the church or churchyard, and there to dance, or play any unseemly parts, with scoffs, jests, wanton gestures, or ribald talk ... .' 3 London, 1 9 I 4 4 The
Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), I, r8r, n,
I. (7) Shakespeare's gay comedy is like Aristophanes’ because its expression of life is shaped by the form of feeling of such saturnalian occasions as these. The traditional Christian culture within which such holidays were celebrated in the Renaissance of course gave a very different emphasis and perspective to Shakespeare's art. But Dicaeopolis, worsting pompous Lamachus in The Acharnians by invoking the tangible benefits of Bacchus and Aphrodite, acts the same festive part as Sir Toby baffling Malvolio's visitation by an appeal to cakes and ale. The clarification achieved by the festive comedies is concomitant to the release they dramatize: a heightened awareness of the relation between man and "nature"-- the nature celebrated on holiday. The process of translating festive experience into drama involved extending the sort of awareness traditionally associated with holiday, and also becoming conscious of holiday itself in a new way. The plays present a mockery of what is unnatural which gives scope and point to the sort of scoffs and jests shouted by dancers in the churchyard or in "the quaint mazes in the wanton green." And they include another, complementary mockery of what is merely natural, a humor which puts holiday in perspective with life as a whole. The butts in the festive plays consistently exhibit their unnaturalness by being kill-joys. On an occasion "full of warm blood, of mirth," they are too preoccupied with perverse satisfactions like pride or greed to "let the world slip" and join the dance. Satirical comedy tends to deal with relations between social classes and aberrations in movements between them. Saturnalian comedy is satiric only incidentally; its clarification comes with movement between poles of restraint and release in everybody's experience. Figures like Malvolio and Shylock embody the sort of kill-joy qualities which the "disguised persons" would find in any of Grindal's curates who would not suffer them to enter the churchyard. Craven or inadequate people appear, by virtue of the festive orientation, as would-be revellers, comically inadequate to hear the chimes at midnight. Pleasure thus becomes the touchstone for judgment of what bars it or is incapable of it. And though in Shakespeare the judgment is usually responsible-- valid we feel for everyday as well as holiday-- it is the whirligig of impulse that tries the characters. Behind the laughter at the butts there is always a sense of solidarity about pleasure, a communion embracing the merrymakers in the play and the audience, who have gone on holiday in going to a comedy. (8) While perverse hostility to pleasure is a subject for aggressive festive abuse, high flown idealism is mocked too, by a benevolent ridicule which sees it as a not unnatural attempt to be more than natural. It is unfortunate that Shakespeare's gay plays have come to be known as "the romantic comedies," for they almost always establish a humorous perspective about the vein of hyperbole they borrow from Renaissance romances. Wishful absolutes about love's finality, cultivated without reserve in conventional Arcadia, are made fun of by suggesting that love is not a matter of life and death, but of springtime, the only pretty ring time. The lover's conviction that he will love "forever and a day" is seen as an illusion born of heady feeling, a symptom of the festive moment: Say 'a day' without the 'ever.' No, no, Orlando! Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. (A.Y.L. IV.i.r46-r50) This sort of clarification about love, a recognition of the seasons, of nature's part in man, need not qualify the intensity of feeling in the festive comedies: Rosalind when she says these lines is riding the full tide of her passionate gaiety. Where the conventional romances tried to express intensity by elaborating hyperbole according to a pretty, pseudo-theological system, the comedies express the power of love as a compelling rhythm in man and nature. So the term "romantic comedies" is misleading. Shakespeare, to be sure, does not always transform his romantic plot materials. In the Claudio-Hero business in Much Ado, for example, the borrowed plot involved negative behavior on the basis of romantic absolutes which was not changed to carry festive feeling. Normally, however, as in Twelfth Night, he radically alters the emphasis when he employs romantic materials. Events which in his source control the mood, and are drawn out to exhibit extremity of devotion, producing now pathos, now anxiety, now sentiment, are felt on his stage, in the rhythm of stage time, as incidents controlled by a prevailing mood of revel. What was sentimental extremity becomes impulsive extravagance. And judgment, not committed to systematic wishful distortion, can observe with Touchstone how (9) We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. (A.Y.L. II.iv.53-56) To turn on passionate experience and identify it with the holiday moment, as Rosalind does in insisting that the sky will change, puts the moment in perspective with life as a whole. Holiday, for the Elizabethan sensibility, implied a contrast with "everyday," when "brightness falls from the air." Occasions like May day and the Winter Revels, with their cult of natural vitality, were maintained within a civilization whose daily view of life focused on the mortality implicit in vitality. The tolerant disillusion of Anglican or Catholic culture allowed nature to have its day. But the release of that one day was understood to be a temporary license, a "misrule" which implied rule, so that the acceptance of nature was qualified. Holiday affirmations in praise of folly were limited by the underlying assumption that the natural in man is only one part of him, the part that will fade. "How that a life was but a flower" (A.Y.L. V.iii.29) was a two sided theme: it was usually a gesture preceding "And therefore take the present time"; but it could also lead to the recognition that
so, from
hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, The second emphasis was implicit in the first; which attitude toward nature predominated depended, not on alternative "philosophies," but on where you were within a rhythm. And because the rhythm is recognized in the comedies, sentimental falsification is not necessary in expressing the ripening moment. It is indeed the present mirth and laughter of the festive plays-- the immediate experience they give of nature's beneficence-- which reconciles feeling, without recourse to sentimentality or cynicism, to the clarification conveyed about nature's limitations. [ IO J Shakespeare's
Route to Festive Comedy In drawing parallels between holiday and Shakespeare's comedy, it has been hard to avoid talking as though Shakespeare were a primitive who began with nothing but festival custom and invented a comedy to express it. Actually, of course, he started work with theatrical and literary resources already highly developed. This tradition was complex, and included folk themes and conventions along with the practice of classically trained innovators like Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Shakespeare, though perfectly aware of unsophisticated forms like the morality and the jig, from the outset wrote plays which presented a narrative in three dimensions. In comedy, he began with cultivated models-- Plautus for The Comedy of Errors and literary romance for Two Gentlemen of Verona; he worked out a consistently festive pattern for his comedy only after these preliminary experiments. In his third early comedy, Love's Labour's Lost, instead of dramatizing a borrowed plot, he built his slight story around an elegant aristocratic entertainment. In doing so he worked out the holiday sequence of release and clarification which comes into its own in A Midsummer Night's Dream. This more serious play, his first comic masterpiece, has a crucial place in his development. To make a dramatic epithalamium, he expressed with full imaginative resonance the experience of the traditional summer holidays. He thus found his way back to a native festival tradition remarkably similar to that behind Aristophanes at the start of the literary tradition of comedy. And in expressing the native holiday, he was in a position to use all the resources of a sophisticated dramatic art. So perfect an expression and understanding of folk culture was only possible in the moment when it was still in the blood but no longer in the brain. Shakespeare never made another play from pastimes in the same direct fashion. But the pattern for feeling and awareness which he derived from the holiday occasion in A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes the dominant mode of organization in subsequent 5 Mr. Northrop Frye has formulated a
similar view of Shakespeare's development in a brilliant, compressed
summary of the whole tradition of
literary comedy and
Shakespeare's relation to it, "The Argument of Comedy," English
Institute Essa'ys, 1948,
ed. D. A.
Robertson, Jr. (New York, 1949). (11) comedies until the period of the problem plays. The relation be tween his festive comedy and native folk games is amusingly rejected in the passage from The Taming of The Shrew which I have used as an epigraph. When the bemused tinker Sly is asked with mock ceremony whether he will hear a comedy to "frame your mind to mirth and merriment," his response reflects his ignorant notion that a comedy is some sort of holiday game-- "a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick." He is corrected with: "it is more pleasing stuff ... a kind of history." Shakespeare is neither primitive nor primitivist; he enjoys making game of the inadequacy of Sly's folk notions of entertainment. But folk attitudes and motifs are still present, as a matter of course, in the dramatist's cultivated work, so that even Sly is not entirely off the mark about comedy. Though it is a kind of history, it is the kind that frames the mind to mirth. So it functions like a Christmas gambol. It often includes gambols, and even, in the case of As You Like It, a tumbling trick. Though Sly has never seen a comedy, his holiday mottoes show that he knows in what spirit to take it: "let the world slip"; "we shall ne'er be younger." Prince Hal, in his festive youth, "daff’d the world aside/ And bid it pass" (H.IV. V.i.96). Feste sings that "Youth's a stuff will not endure" (Twel. II.iii.53). The part of Shakespeare's earliest work where his mature patterns of comedy first appear clearly is, as I have suggested, the clowning. Although he did not find an entirely satisfactory comic form for the whole play until A Midsummer Night's Dream, the clown's part is satisfactory from the outset. Here the theatrical conventions with which he started writing already provided a congenial saturnalian organization of experience, and Shakespeare at once began working out its larger implications. It was of course a practice, going back beyond The Second Shepherds' Play, for the clowns to present a burlesque version of actions performed seriously by their betters. Wagner's conjuring in Dr. Faustus is an obvious example. In the drama just before Shakespeare began writing, there are a great many parallels of this sort between the low comedy and the main action. 6 William Empson
discusses the effects achieved by such double plots in English Pastoral
Poetry (New York, 1938 i originally printed with the better title, Some
Versions of Pastoral, London, 1935), pp. 27-86. I am much indebted to Mr. Empson's work: festive comedy, as I discuss it here, is a
"version of pastoral.'' [ I2 ] One suspects that they often resulted from the initiative of the clown performer; he was, as Sidney said, thrust in "by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters"-- and the handiest part to play was a low take-off of what the high people were doing. Though Sidney objected that the performances had "neither decency nor discretion," such burlesque, when properly controlled, had an artistic logic which Shakespeare was quick to develop. At the simplest level, the clowns were foils, as one of the aristocrats remarks about the clown's show in Love's Labour's Lost: 'tis some policy To have one show worse than the King's and his company. (L.L.L. V.ii.513-514) But burlesque could also have a positive effect, as a vehicle for expressing aberrant impulse and thought. When the aberration was made relevant to the main action, clowning could provide both release for impulses which run counter to decency and decorum, and the clarification about limits which comes from going beyond the limit. Shakespeare used this movement from release to clarification with masterful control in clown episodes as early as 2 Henry VI. The scenes of the Jack Cade rebellion in that history are an astonishingly consistent expression of anarchy by clowning: the popular rising is presented throughout as a saturnalia, ignorantly undertaken in earnest; Cade's motto is: "then are we in order when we are most out of order" (IV.iii.199). In the early plays, the clown is usually represented as oblivious of what his burlesque implies. When he becomes the court fool, however, he can use his folly as a stalking horse, and his wit can express directly the function of his role as a dramatized commentary on the rest of the action. In creating Falstaff, Shakespeare fused the clown's part with that of a festive celebrant, a Lord of Misrule, and worked out the saturnalian implications of both traditions more drastically and more complexly than anywhere else. If in the idyllic plays the humorous perspective can be described as looking past the reigning festive moment to the work-a-day world beyond, in I Henry IV, the relation of comic and serious action can be described by saying that holiday is balanced against everyday and (I3) the doomsday of battle. The comedy expresses impulses and awareness inhibited by the urgency and decorum of political life, so that the comic and serious strains are contrapuntal, each conveying the ironies limiting the other. Then in 2 Henry IV Shakespeare confronts the anarchic potentialities of misrule when it seeks to become not a holiday extravagance but an everyday racket. It might be logical to start where Shakespeare started, by considering first the festive elements present in the imitative comedies and the early clowns and in the literary and theatrical traditions of comedy into which he entered as an apprentice. Instead, because Shakespeare's development followed the route I have sketched, I start with three chapters dealing with the Elizabethan tradition of holiday and with two examples of holiday shows, then enter Shakespeare's work at Love's Labour's Lost, where he first makes use of festivity in a large way. To begin with the apprenticeship would involve saying over again a great deal that has been said before in order to separate out the festive elements with which I am properly concerned. It is important to recognize, however, here at the outset, that the order of my discussion brings out the social origins of the festive mode of comedy at the expense of literary and theatrical origins. It would be possible to start with festive affinities of the comic plots Shakespeare found at hand. One could go on to notice how Shakespeare tends to bring out this potential in the way he shapes his early comedies. And one could say a great deal about the way he uses his early clowns to extrapolate the follies of their masters, notably about Launce's romance with his dog Crab as a burlesque of the extravagant romantic postures of the two gentlemen of Verona. Much of this "apprentice" work is wonderful. And it is wonderful what powers are in the comic machine itself, in the literary-theatrical resource for organizing experience which was there for the young Shakespeare to appropriate. But by looking first at the social resource of holiday customs, and then at the early masterpieces where he first fully uses this resource on the stage, we shall be able to bring into focus an influence from the life of his time which shaped his comic art profoundly. ( 14 ] The sort of interpretation I have proposed in outline here does not center on the way the comedies imitate characteristics of actual men and manners; but this neglect of the social observation in the plays does not imply that the way they handle social materials is unimportant. Comedy is not, obviously enough, the same thing as ritual; if it were, it would not perform its function. To express the underlying rhythm his comedy had in common with holiday, Shakespeare did not simply stage mummings; he found in the social life of his time the stuff for "a kind of history." We can see in the Saint George plays how cryptic and arbitrary action derived from ritual becomes when it is merely a fossil remnant. In a self-conscious culture, the heritage of culture is kept alive by art which makes it relevant as a mode of perception and expression. The artist gives the ritual pattern aesthetic actuality by discovering expressions of it in the fragmentary and incomplete gestures of daily life. He fulfills these gestures by making them moments in the complete action which is the art form. The form finds meaning in life. This process of translation from social into artistic form has great historical as well as literary interest. Shakespeare's theater was taking over on a professional and everyday basis functions which until his time had largely been performed by amateurs on holiday. And he wrote at a moment when the educated part of society was modifying a ceremonial, ritualistic conception of human life to create a historical, psychological conception. His drama, indeed, was an important agency in this transformation: it provided a "theater" where the failures of ceremony could be looked at in a place apart and understood as history; it provided new ways of representing relations between language and action so as to express personality. In making drama out of rituals of state, Shakespeare makes clear their meaning as social and psychological conflict, as history. So too with the rituals of pleasure, of misrule, as against rule: his comedy presents holiday magic as imagination, games as expressive gestures. At high moments it brings into focus, as part of the play, the significance of the saturnalian form itself as a paradoxical human need, problem and resource. [I5 ] Chapter 2 HOLIDAY CUSTOM AND ENTERTAINMENT I came once myself to a place, riding on a journey
homeward from London, and I sent word overnight into the town that I would
preach there in the morning because it was a holy day, and me
thought it was an holy day's work. The church stood in my way, and I took my
horse, and my company, and went thither. I thought I should have found a great
company in the church, and when I came there, the church door was fast
locked. I tarried there half an hour and more, at last the key was found and
one of the parish comes to me and says: “Sir this is
a busy day with us, we cannot hear you, it is Robin Hood's day. The parish are gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood. I pray
you let them not.” -- Bishop Hugh
Latimer, Sixth Sermon before Edward VI During Shakespeare's lifetime, England became conscious of holiday custom as it had not been before, in the very period when in many areas the keeping of holidays was on the decline. Festivals which worked within the rhythm of an agricultural calendar, in village or market town, did not fit the way of living of the urban groups whose energies were beginning to find expression through what Tawney has called the Puritan ethic. The Puritan spokesmen who attacked the holidays looked at them from the outside as people had not had occasion to do before. The effect of the Reformation throughout the Elizabethan church was to discourage festive ceremonials along with ceremonies generally. The traditional saturnalian customs were kept up in the unselfconscious regions of the countryside. But attitudes that meant one thing in the static, monolithic world of village and manor meant other things, more complex and challenging, when (16) continued in the many-minded world of city and court. Under Elizabeth, the court circle kept high days without making an issue of them and enjoyed the elaboration of native customs in all sorts of neo-classical guises. Under James, courtiers and their literary spokesmen began to be militant in defending holiday, the king himself intervening to protect the popular pastimes from Puritan repression. In the Jacobean period the defense of holiday pleasures by a group whose everyday business was pleasure often became trivial and insincere. Shakespeare, coming up to London from a rich market town, growing up in the relatively unselfconscious 1570's and 80’s and writing his festive- plays in the decade of the 90's, when most of the major elements in English society enjoyed a moment of reconcilement, was perfectly situated to express both a countryman's participation in holiday and a city-man's consciousness of it. The evidence about the Elizabethan holidays has been thoroughly gathered and marshalled by responsible modern scholars. Renaissance accounts tend to be either cryptic or highly colored: those who take the customs for granted do not spell them out, while the fuller descriptions come from moralizing Puritans or pastoralizing poets. Some quotations, several of them very familiar, can convey what the popular holiday was like; then I shall indicate briefly how aristocratic entertainments elaborated and supplemented the customary pastimes. C. R. Baskervill has two paragraphs which provide a useful modern survey of the range of native custom: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance a great variety of sports and pastimes were popular with all classes. The occasion might be a simple gathering on the village green of a summer afternoon or in the hall on a winter night. It might be a marriage feast, a harvest supper, or a local wake or fair. More likely it was one of the great festivals celebrated pretty generally throughout Western Europe, as those of Easter, May, Whitsun tide, Midsummer, or the Christmas season. The nature of the festivities depended partly on the occasion celebrated, so that the same group varied its pastimes at Christmas, May Day, Midsummer, or Harvest. Often the chief feature was some modification of ancient pagan ritual, but even here the different parishes had their special customs.... [ I7 ] Of course such revelry was often of the most informal sort; but the general tendency, especially on the great festival occasions, was to organize it under leaders, usually a lord and a lady or a king and a queen, with attendants who paralleled the functionaries of a castle or a royal court. The leaders presided over the pastimes and often played a prominent part in them. No doubt the celebrants generally engaged in social dancing, in the pastimes that have survived as singing games of children, and in sports and contests of various sorts, the festival king or queen awarding prizes in contests or dispensing punishments in forfeit games. But there was a special group of entertainers representing the talent of the community. Some of these prepared a group dance like the morris, or a mummers' play, or perhaps even a dramatic performance of some sort drawn from a more sophisticated source. Much of the entertainment, however, seems to have been of a simpler type, consisting of comic speeches or of special dances and songs by one or two characters. At least one disard in the role of fool or daemon commonly took a conspicuous part in the procedure, at times as leader. After the local celebration the whole organization was often carried to the neighboring villages, and groups from villages in the same general region exchanged visits. Groups of performers also frequently went on rounds of visits to the castles of neighboring lords and to the more important towns during their holidays, becoming for the time bodies of strolling players. To the whole procedure of the organized group various names were applied, like revels, disguising, interlude, or game. (The Elizabethan Jig (Chicago, 1929), pp. 6-8.) For our purposes, it will be enough to consider two principal forms of festivity, the May games and the Lord of Misrule, noticing particularly how what is done by the group of celebrants involves the composition of experience in ways which literature and drama could take over. When the parish went abroad "to gather for Robin Hood" they did not need to put into words what they were gathering, since they had it in their hands in hawthorn branches: one name for hawthorn is "may." The bringing home of May acted out an experience of the relationship between vitality in people and nature. The poets have merely to describe May Day to develop a metaphor relating man and nature. In Herrick's Corinna's Going a Maying, where the tradition has become elegantly conscious art, the gesture towards nature is conveyed by witty identifications: he speaks, of "a budding Boy or Girl ..." and says deliberately impossible things like (I8) Rise, and put on your foliage, and be seen In Spenser's more straightforward account in The Shepherd's Calendar, written early in the period, the same metaphorical action is scarcely detached from direct description of behavior: Palinode. Is not
thilke the mery moneth of May, Piers.
For Younkers Palinode
such follies fitte, Palinode. Sicker
this morrowe,
ne lenger agoe, [ I9 ] That to the many
a Horne pype playd, Ah Piers, bene not thy teeth on edge, to thinke, The Poetical Works of
Edmund Spenser, Palinode sets the people-vegetation metaphor in motion merely by saying "We clerics are dressed in the wrong liveries. Look at the others, all dressed in gaudy green, and the grass, and the trees." In such festive poetry, even though it had a long literary history, the activity of the holiday shapes the meaning seen and felt in nature-- a different meaning from that arrived at when people "outgo" in a different fashion, for example by taking Wordsworth's kind of contemplative walk. Nature is "May"-- what they dance out to, and fetch home for decorating house and church. At the same time "May" is a lord, so they can express a relation to the season by doing honor to him and his lady Flora. A feeling for the spring stemming from actual holiday celebration appears in the earliest surviving English love poems: Lenten is
come with love
to toune In the manner of "Sumer is icumen in," this fourteenth-century lyric goes on to describe how all living things are stirring together. The leaves "waxen al with wille," wild creatures make merry, [20 ] Wormes woweth under claude, The worms below and the women above are connected by the holiday institution, which is prior to metaphor. The composition of the poetry follows relations made by the composition of the holiday. We shall consider later the way many of Shakespeare's songs are similarly organized by implicit or explicit reference to a festive occasion. 4 Some of the most circumstantial accounts of the games were produced by the Puritan Phillip Stubbes in his popular Anatomie of Abuses . .. in the Country of Ailgna. The transparent fiction of describing a foreign country was not altogether inappropriate, for Merry England was becoming foreign to the pious tradesman's London for which Stubbes was spokesman. His assumptions in describing the games can serve to bring out, by contrast, several of the fundamental social conditions on which the holiday customs depended: Against May, Whitsunday, or other time all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes .... And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports, namely, Satan, prince of hell. Stubbes equates the traditional summer lord with Satan! But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus: They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this Maypole (this stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground round about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravity and reputation, that of forty, three-score, or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth. Early English Lyrics, ed.
E. K. Chambers and
F. Sidgwick (London,
1947),no. V. 4 See below, pp. 113 ff. (21) It is remarkable how pleasantly the holiday comes through in spite of Stubbes' railing on the sidelines. Partly this appeal comes from shrewd journalism: he is writipg "a pleasant invective," to use a phrase from the title of Stephen Gosson's similar School of Abuse. Partly it is the result of the fact that despite his drastic attitude he writes in the language of Merry England and so is betrayed into phrases like "sweet nosegays." And his Elizabethan eye is too much on the object to leave out tangible details, so that, astonishingly, he describes "this stinking idol" as "covered all over with flowers and herbs." By way of emphasizing the enormity of the evil, Stubbes insists that it is not confined to young men and maids, that "old men and wives" also "run gadding to the woods," that "men, women and children" follow the Maypole home. The consequence of this emphasis, for a modern reader, is to bring out how completely all groups who lived together within the agricultural calendar shared in the response to the season. Elsewhere Stubbes explicitly objects to people all keeping holiday together. In objecting to wakes, he acknowledges that it is proper for "one friend to visit another" and "congratulate their coming with some good cheer." "But," he says, "why at one determinate day more than at another (except business urged it) ? " I think it convenient for one friend to visit another (at some times) as opportunity and occasion shall offer itself; but where for should the whole town, parish, village, and country keep one and the same day, and make such gluttonous feasts as they do? 5 The Anatomie of Abuses ... in Ailgna (1583), ed. F. V, Furnival (London, 1877-82), p. 149. Here, and elsewhere
in all quotations except those from Spenser, Ihave modernized the
spelling and punctuation. (22) Clearly Stubbes assumes a world of isolated, busy individuals, each prudently deciding how to make the best use of his time. Another of his objections is that "the poor men that bear the charges of these feasts and wakes, are the poorer, and keep the worser houses a long time after."6 Here again he assumes that what matters is the maintenance of individual households at as respectable a level as thrift can contrive. The Puritan ethic contrasts all along the line with the sort of "housekeeping" which went with festive liberty. The excesses Stubbes deplores did not threaten people whose places in a traditional arrangement of life one gaudy night or day could not disturb. Since everyone was out together, and the high day came only at an established time, no one need be anxious. Where morality was necessary for the city merchant, and discretion for the city gentleman of leisure, to avoid bankruptcy or a rake's progress, the merrimakers could rely on a communal rhythm to bring them, all together still, back on an even keel. No doubt there were consequences, sometimes unpleasant, for some of those maids about whom the men of great gravity put their heads together. As Ophelia sings about Saint Valentine's Day: Young men will do't if they come to't ... Nashe, in presenting the delights of Spring in Summer's Last Will and Testament, has a song sung by "three clowns and three maids" which enjoys the same fact Stubbes deplores: From the
town to the
grove When this side of the holiday is isolated, the relishing of it can become merely prurient. But usually there is a recognition, coming through the bawdry, of a larger force at work, whether the tone be harsh or genial. Nashe has another song, earlier in his Spring scene, which has this wider focus: 6 Ibid,, p.
153. 7 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London,
r9ro), m, 240. (23) The fields breathe
sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, Nashe's pageant dramatizes Spring as a prodigal gallant who flaunts unrepentant extravagance: what I had, I have spent on good fellows. In these sports you have seen, which are proper to the Spring, and others of like sort (as giving wenches green gowns, making garlands for fencers, and tricking up children gay) have I bestowed all my flowery treasure, and flower of my youth.' Here again the children are in it too-- as well as those old wives who sit a sunning. And it is in the grove that love hath no gain saying. The gathering of foliage in the woods, the setting up of summer halls, the straining towards identification in wearing garlands, even dressing entirely in foliage as "jacks o'th'green"-- all such custom relates the emotions of love to its fructifying functions. Separation of feeling from function is at the root of perversity and lust. May-game wantonness has a reverence about it because it is a realization of a power of life larger than the individual, crescent both in men and in their green surroundings. In the customs which center on a Lord of Misrule, the rougher pleasures of defiance and mockery are uppermost, in contrast to the lyric gathering-in of the May games; Abuse predominates over Invocation, though both gestures are usually present, in varying degree, when a holiday group asserts its liberty and promotes its solidarity. The formal Lord of Misrule presided over the eating and drinking within-doors in the cold season. But the title was also applied to the captain of summer Sunday drinking and dancing by the young men of a parish, a leader whose role was not necessarily distinct from the Robin or King of the Maying. 8. Ibid., p. 239 9Jhid., p. 240. (24) The winter lord of the feast reigns chiefly at night: the Duchess of Malfi, rallying her husband Antonio when he insists on staying with her overnight, says "you are a Lord of Misrule," and he answers with a wry reference to his clandestine role, "True, for my reign is only in the night." On Twelfth Night the Lord was often the King of the Bean, having found the bean in his portion of cake. Although identified especially with the twelve days of feasting at Christmas, the custom was naturally used at feasts in other seasons, notably at Shrovetide, and at harvest: Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), speaks of "next neighbors and kindred" consuming " great part of the night in Christmas rule" at the harvest dinners customarily given "by every wealthy man, or, as we term it, every good liver." It was in the households of such men, or in the still larger establishments of institutions or of the nobility, that the more formal lords were set up at feasts. Holinshed observes that at Christmas of old ordinary course, there is always one appointed to make sport in the court, called commonly lord of misrule: whose office is not unknown to such as have been brought up in noblemen's houses, and among great housekeepers which use liberal feasting in that season.12 One can see why formal misrule would be most used in formal households, where people regularly ate, more or less in awe, under the countenance of My Lord. My Lord of Misrule, burlesquing majesty by promoting license under the forms of order, would be useful to countenance the revelry of such a group. And by giving way to a substitute, the master's own authority was kept clear of compromise. The custom seems to have been a secularized version of the Feast of Fools, when the solemn decorum of cathedral services would be suddenly turned upside down as the inferior clergy heard the glad tidings that "He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree" (Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles)." 10 John Webster, The
Duchess of Malfi, in
The Best Plays
of Webster and Tourneur, ed. John Aldington Symonds
(London, 1948), p. 1 7 5
(III.ii.9). 11 Popular Antiquities
of Great Britain ... from
the Materials Collected
by John Brand, ed.
W. Carew Hazlitt (London,
r87o), I, 307. 12 Quoted
by Chambers, Mediaeval
Stage, I, 403, n. 3• 13
lbid., pp. 278 ff. and 403 ff.; and Welsford,
Fool, pp. 211 ff. (25) In the secular life of the Renaissance period, as awe of man for master diminished, so would the fun of such a custom. A decline is apparent in the discontinuance of the Lord of Misrule at court under Mary and Elizabeth-- after most elaborate ceremonies at court and in the city under Edward VI and occasionally under Henry VIII. There was also a decline of Christmas rule in most of the University colleges and in the Inns of Court. But the custom was perfectly familiar in such institutions, as is clear from Chambers' summary of the quite numerous occasions for which evidence survives of collegiate misrule during Elizabeth's reign. "The few circumstantial accounts show farced protocol and titles worked out with the completeness that young lawyers and scholars would relish, while the whole occasion is for the most part rather decorously formal. But though it was usually misrule by the book, taking no chance, there are glimpses of moments when the mummery came alive, and occasionally something headlong would boil up. Hazlitt's edition of Brand's Antiquities quotes Sir Thomas Urquhart: They may be said to use their King as about Christmas we used to do the King of Misrule, whom we invest with that title to no other end, but to countenance the Bacchanalian riots and preposterous disorders of the family where he is installed." Herrick's treatment of the custom is rather insipid, concluding with Give then to the
King Selden takes the custom for granted in noting its relation to its Roman prototype: Christmas succeeds the Saturnalia, the same time, the same number of holidays; then the master waited upon the servant, like the Lord of Misrule.17 14
Ibid., pp. 407-4 I9• 15 Hazlittl Antiquities, II,
370. 16 "Twelfth Night,
or King and
Queen," The Poetical
Works of Robert
Herrick, ed. F. W. Moorman (New
York, 1947), p. 310. [ 26 ] The basic pattern of a mock king or lord was adaptable to a variety of occasions less formal than seasonal feasts: the Ale-cunner, for example, had this sort of role in presiding over village wake or church ale. Mock-majesty was often improvised in taverns, as we shall see in considering how Nashe presents Bacchus as a prince of tavern mates. In the Sunday pastimes of villages during the summer, a Lord of Misrule would be set up by "all the wildheads of the parish," as Stubbes calls them in a pleasant and indignant description of the mock-king and his morris-dancing retinue. This could be a very different sort of role from that of the Lord of a gentlemen's feast. Stubbes recognizes explicitly a connection of such games with drama; he speaks of them just after denouncing the theaters, and calls them "the other kind of plays, which you call Lords of Misrule." We shall consider in detail in the next chapter an instance in Lincolnshire of the kind of thing he describes in general terms: First, all the wildheads of the parish, conventing together, choose them a grand captain (of all mischief) whom they ennoble with the title of "my Lord of Misrule," and him they crown with great solemnity, and adopt for their king. This king anointed chooseth forth twenty, forty, threescore or a hundred lusty guts, like to himself, to wait upon his lordly majesty and to guard his noble person. Then every one of these his men, he investeth with his liveries of green, yellow, or some other light wanton colour. And as though that were not (bawdy) gaudy enough, I should say, they bedeck themselves with scarves, ribbons and laces hanged all over with gold rings, precious stones, and other jewels. This done, they tie about either leg twenty or forty bells, with rich handkerchiefs in their hands, and sometimes laid across over their shoulders and necks, borrowed for the most part of their pretty Mopsies and loving Besses, for bussing them in the dark. 17 Table Talk, ed. Frederick Pollock (London,
1927), p. 28. (27) Thus all things set in order, then have they their hobby-horses, dragons and other antiques [i.e. antics?] together with their bawdy pipers and thundering drummers to strike up the devil's dance withal. Then march these heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the rout. And in this sort they go to the church (I say) and into the church (though the minister be at prayer or preaching) dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs over their heads in the church, like devils incarnate, with such a confused noise, that no man can hear his own voice. Then the foolish people they look, they stare, they laugh, they fleer, and mount upon forms and pews to see these goodly pageants solemnized in this sort. Then, after this, about the church they go again and again, and so forth into the churchyard, where they have commonly their summer halls, their bowers, arbors and banqueting houses set up, wherein they feast, banquet and dance all that day and (peradventure) all the night too. And thus these terrestrial furies spend the sabbath day. They have also certain papers, wherein is painted some babblery or other of imagery work, and these they call
"my Lord of Misrule's badges."
These they give to everyone that will give money for them to maintain them in
their heathenry, devilry, whoredom, drunkenness, pride and what not. And who
will not be buxom to them and give them money for these their devilish cognizances, they are mocked and flouted at not a little.
And so as sotted are some, that they not only give
them money to maintain their abomination withal, but also wear their badges
and cognizances in their hats or caps openly."
Stubbes, Anatomie,
pp. 147-148 The morris dance Stubbes here describes was thoroughly traditional: the dance typically included the skirmishing, curvetting hobbyhorse, the Besse or Maid Marian who dressed himself up in women's clothes, and the fool, usually the leading dancer, often in regalia which carried bawdy suggestions. 18 Stubbes, Anatomie,
pp. 147-148. Chambers cites several instances of lords of misrule in the
summer in Mediaeval
Stage, I, 173, n. 7 [28 ] Hazlitt quotes a description from I614: It was my hap of
late, by chance Part of the by play was the fool's courting of the Maid Marian by dancing about her. But group dancing was the chief thing. The jerking about of handkerchiefs and the stiff kneed step of the morris conveyed a super abundance of vitality. Each foot was brought "forward alternately with a sharp swing (almost a jerk)"; frequently every alternate or every fourth step was a hop; a dancer made capers by exaggerating the regular step with a vigorous jump by the supporting foot; he made jumps by springing as high as possible with both legs straight." The virile self-assertion of such dancing is caught effectively in lines of the Duke of York in 2 Henry VI when he is plotting to incite Jack Cade to lead a rebellion and describes Cade's hardihood in the Irish wars: his thighs with darts Such an upstarting, indomitable gesture is perfect for the leader of a rising which is presented as a sort of saturnalia. The village saturnalia of the Lord of Misrule's men was in its way a sort of rising; setting up a mock lord and demanding homage for him are playfully rebellious gestures, into which Dionysian feeling can flow. Stubbes is clearly exaggerating when he talks as though such groups regularly interrupted divine service inside the church. But the churchyard was certainly a center for merrymaking, partly because the church had taken the place of the pagan fane which dances once honoured, partly because the churchyard was in any case the parish meeting place, partly perhaps because to go there was excitingly impudent. The wanton mood would be abetted by encountering someone who, refusing to give homage to My Lord in return for one of his badges, declared himself a craven or a kill-joy, was "mocked and flouted not a little," and so, as we shall see, might provide an occasion for the birth of satire from festive abuse. 19 From Rablet's Cobbes, Prophesies
(1614), quoted in Hazlitt,
Antiquities, II, 20 Baskervill, Jig, pp. 353 ff. His account is based on Cecil
Sharp, who studied
still-continuing traditions of
dancing which fit
with illustrations and
descriptions from the Renaissance. (29) Tudor kings and queens came and went about their public affairs in a constant atmosphere of make-believe, with a sibyl lurking in every court-yard and gateway, and a satyr in the boscage of every park, to turn the ceremonies of welcome and farewell, without which sovereigns must not move, by the arts of song and dance and mimetic dialogue, to favour and to prettiness. The fullest scope for such entertainments was afforded by the custom of the progress, which Ied the Court summer by summer, to remove from London and the great palaces of the Thames and renew the migratory life of the great dynasties,, wandering for a month or more over the fair face of the land, and housing itself in the outlying castles and royal manors, or claiming the ready hospitality of the territorial gentry and the provincial cities. This was a holiday, in which the sovereign sought change of air and the recreation of hunting and such other pastimes as the country yields. The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, I923), I 1 107. Obviously the pastimes of the court were occasions of a very different character from the free-and-easy festivities of a parish or the convivialities of a group of next neighbors and kindred at a manor. Yet the courtly entertainments tendered Elizabeth reflected the popular tradition of seasonal holidays and greatly influenced its translation into comedy. The Queen's presence inevitably made for constraint: though she herself could be wonderfully downright and spontaneous, she was not one to suspend her majesty-- misrule had to keep well clear of that. And at court play and business were not distinct: much 21 The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford,
I923), I 1 107. (30) of the art of the courtier lay in deftly working through pleasure to profit. Anxiety and ambition were apt to be involved in the exceedingly expensive entertainments provided by noble families. One is repeatedly surprised at how much good fun the noble company could have under the conditions of court life. Because they were habituated to decorum, they could be relatively free within its limits. A fountain in Leicester's garden at Kenilworth, during the famous entertainment of 1575, was fitted with a hidden spout, so that when unwary guests lingered to look closely at its ornate carvings, with the wreast of a cock, water spouted upward and drenched them "from top to toe; the he's to some laughing, but the shee's to more sport. This some time was occupied to very good pastime. 22 The highest class shared in the feeling for holiday freedom. But the conditions of court life made its expression complex, and put a premium on detached artistic realization. Of course the pastimes presented were often not even indirectly expressive of festive attitudes or themes. There was much solemn flattery of Elizabeth; there were presentations of local or family history or heroes; allegorical shows of virtues and vices; romantic narratives tied to the appearance of local nymphs whom only Elizabeth could release from vile enchantments. Literary pastoral and mythology were the most common idious, frequently handled in a merely literary way. But mythological and pastoral materials often drew life from native traditions. Music, song, and dance could have the same functions as at simpler merrymakings. And the traditional popular pastimes themselves were often an element in the entertainment, either as a spectacle performed by "the country people" and watched with complacency and amusement by the court circle, or as a holiday exercise in which the courtiers themselves participated, as they participated in the disguisings of the masque. 22 From
Robert Laneham's account
of the entertainment, reprinted
in John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, etc. of
Queen Elizabeth (London,
r8z3), I 1 476 ff. (31) The commonest style of pageantry in tribute to the queen is pleasantly epitomized in a madrigal contributed by George Kirbye to The Triumphes of Oriana (I601): Bright Phoebus greets most clearly Poetic fictions such as these were acted out repeatedly at country houses. Thetis would leave "the mermaids' tunes admired" at the climax of a show where music crept by upon the waters of a garden lake. To make the most of elaborating fact with fiction, the presentation of a gift was often tied into a story, as in Peele's Arraignment of Paris (1584), where the gift of the apple to the queen resolves the jealous conflict previously depicted between the rival goddesses.24 The whole conception of gathering in the powers reigning in the countryside to yield them to Elizabeth, and of Elizabeth vivifying the countryside by her magic presence, has affinities with the traditional lustral visit of mummery lord and lady, when they made their quete to bring the luck of the season to the village and the house. On many occasions the queen herself is put in the role of a supreme summer lady, to whom the others come to do homage. Thus at Elvetham in I 591, although she comes late in September she is greeted with verses describing a spring renewal from her influence: The
crooked-winding kid trips
o'er the lawns, 23 F.
H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse (Oxford, 192o), p. 150. Chambers
conjectures (Elizabethan Stage, r, 123, n. 3) that The Triumphes
of Oriana ((may have been written as a whole for a
royal birthday or wedding." (32) When the time comes for her departure, Leaves fall,
grass dies, The outdoor country gods drawn from classical paganism find a natural place as patrons of native festive observances; they themselves are not distinct from native figures. Laneham, fancifully summarizing what each god contributed to the Kenilworth entertainment of I575, observes that Pan sent "his merry morris, with their pipe and tabor." This morris was part of a mimic bridal procession staged by the local people: Pan has clearly stolen here from Robin. So too, Bacchus is naturally taken as Lord of Misrule; Ceres is a harvest queen and rides on a hockcart. The grotesque Sylvanus who at Elvetham frightened the country people, "and thereby moved great laughter," is at least a first cousin of the Savage Man or Woodwose, a folk wood spirit, who at Kenilworth held a dialogue with the classical Echo. At Kenilworth, certain good-hearted men of Coventry brought their town's "old storial show": it was a Hocktide sword dance and free-for-all fight between Danes and English, the Danes in the end "led captive for triumph by our English women." The same mock-martial spirit animated a battle at Elvetham between Sylvanus with his forest men and Neptune with his Tritons, the latter using "great squirts." The Coventry show seems to have been a rationalized version of a battle of summer and winter. Its conclusion probably reflects the Hock tide custom by which men and women capture each other. 25 Nichols, Progresses of
Elizabeth, III, 107
and 120. 26 Ibid.,
m, 135. 27 Ibid.,
m, xq II5 and I, 436 and 494 498. At Bisham (1592), the"Wilde Man" is one of Sylvanus'
satyrs (Ibid., m, I31). Chambers effectively sum marizes the fusion
and medley of literary and folk
elements at noble entertainments in
Elizabethan Stage, r, 124 (33) The
practice of superimposing classical
motifs on the
holiday games, as perhaps in an earlier epoch a battle of the seasons at Coventry had been rationalized as a
conflict of Danes and English, appears in a passage from The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Forsaken Julia, in her page's disguise, tells Silvia that at Pentecost When all our pageants of delight were play'd, Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, assumes that "the pageants of delight" were May games, and "the woman's part" Maid Marian's." He happened to neglect what Julia goes on to say that the part was Ariadne passioning And yet the pageants undoubtedly were to be understood as May games, and Ariadne is conceived as taking over the May Lady's part by an entirely familiar sort of Ovidian elaboration on native groundwork. Many pagan goddesses, as well as nymphs, could play "the woman's part": Proserpina glad, running in her best array, might with no change of costume be the Flora who gayly leads a morris described in one of Morley's madrigals." On other occasions there is an English name for the goddess, the Fairy Queen; she may come with her maids to dance and sing in the garden, or may be "drawen with six children in a wagon of state."31 In the written accounts of entertainments, the formal part is obviously more adequately recorded than the impromptu or traditional humor, since a principal motive for publication was to give to the world at large verses written for the occasion. Clearly, therefore, Nichols' collection of documents does not do justice to the informal traditional games and shows used at entertainments. Gascoigne's account of the great Kenilworth festivities gives in full the verse he contributed, including a masque which was not so Fellowes,
Madrigals, p. 129. Nichols, HI, II9;
and Chambers, Elizabethan
Stage, III, 401. At Elvetham
in 1591 her name is Aureola; she speaks of her
consort as "Auberon, the
Fairy King." One of Campion's madrigals ( 1591)
is addressed to "the fairy queen Proserpinal>
(Fellowes, p. 593). The relation of the Elvetham
occasion to Dream, much handled by speculators about
court intrigue, is
effectively treated by Alice S. Venezky in
Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage (New York, 1951), pp. 139
:ff. See below,
pp. 121-22. (34) finally used; he merely mentions the comical shows presented by the common people. Laneham, the lively little hanger-on whose unusual pamphlet Scott used for Kenilworth, had no literary equity to salvage; it is from him that we learn of the folk bride-ale and Battle of Danes and English, "whereat her Majesty laughed well." The Bride-ale seems to have been presented very solemnly by "his lordship's simple neighbors," yet for his lordship's guests it was burlesque. Laneham has art enough to make it funny in the telling. The "bride," by someone’s contrivance, was "a maid of thirty-five years"; and the "bridegroom" had "this special grace by the way, that ever as he would have formed him the better countenance, with the worse face he looked." When holiday was translated to the stage, such shows were a natural for the clowns; and the comments of Shakespeare's aristocrats on their performance are in the same vein as Laneham's. Another source of fun at entertainments, which is merely glanced at in the accounts of them, must have been the incongruity between fact and fiction, and the fun of quick transitions between the two. When one reads the texts of welcomes, of presentation ceremonies, where nymphs appear when trees rive, etc., they often seem almost tediously solemn. But they were witty, or "conceited," when they were performed, by virtue of the deftness with which they extended actuality into make-believe. Because this dramatic dimension was furnished by the occasion, it did not need to be expressed in the language of occasional verses. When Shakespeare puts pageantry on the stage, he makes comedy out of incongruity between make-believe and reality. He contrives dramatic situations which will give the lie to fiction; and he makes the language of the pageant figures themselves betray their dubious status. But before we look at the way Shakespeare made holiday pastimes into comedy for the theater's everyday use, we must look at dramatic games and shows produced on holiday for holiday use. 32 Nichols, I, 443 (35) Chapter
Three MISRULE AS COMEDY; COMEDY AS
MISRULE " … is it fit infirmities of holy men should be acted upon
a stage ... ! ...no passion wherewith the king was possessed, but is
amplified, and openly sported with, and made a May game to all the
beholders." --Henry Crosse, Virtues Common-wealth, 1603 DISTINCTIONS between life and art, the stage and the world, which are obvious for our epoch were not altogether settled for Elizabethans. Such distinctions are not settled for us either in areas where new circumstances are leading to the development of new artistic forms, notably in the case of television. This chapter will consider the tendency for Elizabethan comedy to be a saturnalia, rather than to represent saturnalian experience. Renaissance critics discussed this difference in distinguishing between Old Comedy and New and by regularly explaining how Old Comedy was banned for its scurrility in abusing actual individuals. We can make out, as they did not, rudimentary English versions of Old Comedy, produced on holiday where festive abuse turned into ad hominem satire, and in the newly established professional theater when players borrowed forms of festive abuse from holiday. In 1601, the "Summer Lord Game" of the village of South Kyme in Lincolnshire developed into such satire under the leadership of one Talboys Dymoke, the younger brother of Sir Edward Dymoke, whose house had a bitter and long standing antagonism to the Dymoke's uncle, the avaricious Earl of Lincoln. In dramatizing what he called "The Death of the Lord of Kyme" on the "May pole green" before Sir Edward's house, Talboys Dymoke and his yeomen friends seem to have alluded to the Earl, and taken off his mannerisms, in a fashion which he regarded as lese majesty. 1 Printed by Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, rv, 247. (36) Although we have no text of the performance, only descriptions of it in Star Chamber testimony, its similarity to vetus comoedia is clear. It was composed for performance with the license of a festival; it used traditional roles and stock scenes instead of a fully developed narrative plot; the zest of it came from abuse directed at an actual spoil-sport alazon. But of course, although the occasion and form were broadly Aristophanic, Dymoke's art was rudimentary. A direct development of comedy out of festivity, such as may have happened in Greece, was prevented in Elizabethan England by the existence of an already developed dramatic literature-- and by the whole moral superstructure of Elizabethan society. When the issue was put to the test, license for festive abuse was never granted by Elizabethan officials. The performers of the South Kyme play learned this to their cost; so did the professional players when they tried to step into the Marprelate controversy. Yet the tendency which we shall be examining in this chapter has significance beyond its abortive fruits, because it witnesses to the saturnalian impulse which did find expression in dramatic fiction. Saturnalia could come into its own in the theater by virtue of the distinction between the stage and the world which Puritans were unwilling to make in London but which fortunately prevailed across the river on the Bankside. License and
Lese Majesty in Lincolnshire When we write about holiday license as custom, our detached position is apt to result in a misleading impression that no tensions or chances are involved. For those participating, however, license is not simply a phase in a complacent evolution to foreknown conclusions: it means, at some level, disruption. When majesty in lords is dangerous to meddle with, to act "My Lord of Misrule" or be created one of his retainers says "We are as good as Lords" and at the same time, "Lords are no better than we." The man who acts as a mock lord enjoys building up his dignity, and also exploding it by exaggeration, while his followers both relish his bombast as a fleer at proper authority and also enjoy turning on him and insulting his majesty. Huff-snuff bombast asks for cat-calls. The instability of an interregnum is built into the dynamics of misrule: the game at (37) once appropriates and annihilates the mana of authority. In the process, the fear which normally maintains inhibition is temporarily overcome, and the revellers become wanton, swept along on the freed energy normally occupied in holding themselves in check. To reach this fear and so defy it with intoxicating impunity, misrule has to take a chance. Give it an inch and it must take an ell-or at least more than the allowed inch. One way to get beyond bounds was to move from flouting in general to flouting particular people, from symbolic action toward symbolic action, to use a distinction of Mr. Kenneth Burke’s. This impulse is amusingly graphic in a satirical description, written by John Taylor the water-poet, of London apprentices rioting on Shrove Tuesday: Then Tim Tatters, a most valiant villain, with an ensign made of a piece of a baker's mawkin fixed upon a broom staff, he displays his dreadful colors, and calling the ragged regiment together, makes an illiterate oration, stuffed with most plentiful want of discretion, the conclusion whereof is, that somewhat they will do, but what they know not. Until at last comes marching up another troop of tatterdemalions, proclaiming wars against no matter who, so they may be doing. Then these youths ... put play houses to the sack, and bawdy houses to the spoil, in the quarrel breaking a thousand quarrels (of glass I mean) ... tumbling from the tops of lofty chimneys, terribly un-tilling houses, ripping up the bowels of feather beds. 2 Jack a Lent His
Beginning and Entertainment: With the mad prankes
of his Gentleman-Usher Shrove-Tuesday that goes before him, and his Footman
hunger attending. By John Taylor
(London, 1630), p. 12, in The Old Book
Collector's Miscellany, ed. Charles Hindley
(London, r87z), Vol. II. There seems to have been a positive tradition of
sacking bawdy houses on Shrove Tuesday-- a festive way to give them up for Lent! One is reminded of Doll Tearsheet's
indignant scorn of Pistol (2 H.IV IIiv.): "You a captain/ You
slave, for what/ For tearing a poor whore's ruff in a bawdy house?" See Brand's Popular Antiquities, ed. J. 0.
Halliwell
(London, 1848) [38] The custom of misrule obviously provided a whirligig that could catch up simmering antagonisms and swing them into the open. In the Dymoke case, it was the animus of a county family and their retainers against a tyrannical nobleman. The Earl of Lincoln's almost insane avarice and inhumanity were repeatedly a problem to the Privy Council and a plague to his neighborhood. The case will be worth following in the full human dimensions which have been skillfully presented through excerpts from the Star Chamber Records and the Duke of Northumberland's papers, in Mr. Norreys Jephson O'Conor's study of the Norreys family and their conflict with the Earl, Codes Peace and the Queenes. Since the customs involved are clearly of long standing, the fact that the episode took place in 1601 does not diminish its significance in relation to festive comedy written in the previous decade. The repugnance which the Earl of Lincoln could inspire can be suggested by the remarks of his son-in-law, Sir Arthur Georges, in a letter written to Sir Robert Cecil in 1600 when Lincoln was attempting to deprive his own daughter and Sir Arthur of an estate: None can testify my careful zeal towards this ungrateful miser (better) than you, whom I have so often solicited with excusing his vices. The love I bore his daughter made me do so, and his cankered disposition requites me accordingly.... He has already brought my poor wife to her grave, as I fear, with his late most odious and unnatural despites that he has used towards her, the most obedient child of the world. His wickedness, misery, craft, repugnance to all humanity, and perfidious mind is not among the heathens to be matched. God bless me from him. To have his lands after his death, I would not be tied to observe him in his life. (pp. 98-99) The council repeatedly intervened in attempts to persuade the Earl to do justice to his wife, his children, old retainers, and neighbors; at one point he had to be put in the Tower to compel the payment of a judgment against him. Sir Edward Dymoke and his Lady lived near the Earl's castle at Tattershall in Lincoln. That there was very bad blood between them appears from the fact that in 1595 Sir Edward complained to Cecil that he had at one point been "forced by his Lordship's molestations to break up my house and disperse my servants." Sir Edward's younger 3 Cambridge, 1934. I am grateful to Harvard University Press for
permission to use the very substantial excerpts which follow. I have
modernized the spelling and punctuation of Mr. O'Conor's
quotations from the records. In the rest of this chapter, references to his
text are given by page numbers in parentheses after quotations. My few interpolations, as
well as Mr. O'Conor's, are enclosed in parentheses. (39) brother Talboys, who lived in the Dymoke household, was just the sort of free-wheeling wildhead to come into collision with the Earl. We catch a glimpse of him, through the Star Chamber testimony, stopping at the door of an alehouse kept by one William Hollingshead in Tattershall: "and at that time Anne (Hollingshead) brought forth drink to him and his company as they sat on horse back." "At which time with a loud voice," according to Hollings head, he said, "Commend me, sweetheart, to My Lord of Lincoln...and tell him that he is an ass and a fool ... Is he my uncle and hath no more wit?" Dymoke contended that he had spoken only "about a fortification which the Earl had made about his castle," saying only "What a foolish fortification is this! My Lord sayeth that I am a fool, but I would to God he had a little of my wit in the making of it, for this is the most foolish thing that ever I saw" (pp. 109-IIO). By either version, Dymoke was a man who called his soul his own, aptly named Talboys. In the summer of 1601, Talboys' summer games gave the Earl a chance to attack the Dymoke family by a bill of complaint to the Star Chamber. The bill emphasized the offense of lese majesty done to the Earl: Whereas your Royal Majesty in the whole course of your happy and flourishing reign ... have ever had a gracious regard of the honour and estate of the nobility and peers of this your highness' realm, and men of more inferior condition to them have carried such respective and due observance to the nobles of this kingdom, as they have not once presumed to scandalize or deprave their persons and place by public frowns and reproaches, yet how so it is ... one Talboys Dymoke, a common contriver and publisher of infamous pamphlets and libels, Roger Bayard of Kyme, in your highness' county of Lincoln, yeoman, Marmaduke Dickinson, John Cradock, the elder, and John Cradock, the younger, of Kyme ... yeomen, and other their accomplices, intending as much as in them consisted to scandalize and dishonour your ... subject (i.e. Lincoln) and to bring him into the frown and contempt of the vulgar people of his country, have of late, and since your majesty's last free and general pardon, by the direction, consent, or allowance of Sir Edward Dymoke of Kyme, ... Knight, contrived, published, used, and acted, these disgraceful, false, and intolerable slanders, reproaches, scandalous words, libels, and irreligious profanations ensuing. (pp. 108-109) [40 l The principal basis for the charges lay in two episodes of the summer games. The Earl first ran foul of Talboys Dymoke in the course of Sunday misrule of the kind that Stubbes described. Mr. O'Conor has presented the encounter by quoting from testimony of both sides before the Star Chamber: The May day games at South Kyme, where some of the Dymoke family seem then to have been living, were carried on through most of the summer, and, on Sunday, July 25th or 26th, 1601, twelve or thirteen of those who had been taking part in the games went to the neighbouring village of Coningsby "to be merry . . . as Coningsby men had been with them a fortnight before." Among those who rode from South Kyme were: John Cradock, the younger; Richard Morrys, or Morris; Roger Bayard, and Talboys Dymoke; with John, or Henry, Cocke, of Swinstead; John Easton, of Billinghay; and John Patchett, "who were all present at Coningsby . . . and are retainers to Sir Edward Dymoke." Evidently they took with them a few of the theatrical properties used in the games, for "some of the company had reeds tied together like spears, with a painted paper off the tops of them, and one of them had a drum and another a flag." They "did march on horseback two and two together through the streets ... to one Miles his house, who kept an alehouse" "and there lighting, set up their horses" and "dined." After dinner the company visited two or three other alehouses; Morris said he did not know how many, adding "he knoweth not certainly whether it were on the Sabbath day ... but ... he rather thinketh it was ... because they were at Evening Prayer." There was indignant denial of their having declared that "they had drunk the town of Coningsby ... dry"; however, in the afternoon they resumed their parade through the town. Besides the visitors' drum and flag, Coningsby men had another drum and flag, so that they all must have been able to make a goodly amount of noise, which caused "a great number of people" to come outdoors for the purpose of "looking upon the company." [ 41 l While this display was taking place, and "at such time as they were marching homeward," the Earl of Lincoln ... had occasion of business to ride through a narrow lane" in Coningsby "through which he was to pass by or near the ... company," who, according to Thomas Pigott, gentleman, one of his followers, "behaved themselves very rudely, with shoutings, noises ... that some accompted them to be madmen." To these joyous villagers Pigott was sent "to entreat them to hold still their drums, flags and noise until the ... Earl might quietly pass by them for scaring of his horse." John Cock, the drummer, said that he "did stay till the Earl was gone, and, after he was passed by, Mr. Talboys Dymoke and one Richard Hunt did call to him to strike up his drum." Edward Miles, the alehouse keeper, saw that " Mr. Pigott was cast down from his horse, but by what means he knoweth not, neither what hurt he had; but he did see him presently afoot again and come to his horse." With this statement the companions of Miles agreed, but Pigott himself declared that when he gave the Earl's message, "Talboys Dymoke, Richard Hunt, and some others . . . answered with great oaths that they had a Lord as good as he, and called the company and drums to them back again, and cried aloud, 'Strike up drums! Strike up drums!” (pp. II0-II2) "They had a Lord as good as he" clearly refers to their Lord of Misrule. John Cradock, the younger, was "the Summer Lord of Kyme" (p. I57). He wore a piebald coat that went with the other insignia of misrule, for one of the Earl's retainers testified that he "did hear that there was very ill rule at Coningsby ... and that young Cradock was there in a piebald coat, and that the (Earl) did there call ... Cradock 'piebald knave'" (p. II6). Thus it appears that the real Lord was foolish enough to undertake to face down a mummery Lord. At any rate, the Earl's henchman Pigott tried to do so, and the fact that he was a "heavy, corpulent man" must have been more grist for the merrymakers' mill. Pigott testified that: therewithal (Dymoke and Hunt) caused the drummers and flag bearers to run at (him) with their drums and flags, and the whole company after and amongst them in such violent sort, that his horse did fling and plunge, and the more he entreated them to be quiet, the more fierce and angry they were upon him and his horse, insomuch as his horse cast him . . . to the ground to his great bruising, hurt and damage, being a heavy corpulent man. And it had like to cost him his life; and he was forced to keep to his bed a good space after, and to take physic for the same . . . When he was helped up by one of his acquaintance that stood by ... Hunt and some others cried "Strike him down! Knock him down!" (p. II2) (42) The antagonism which the revellers were expressing was active elsewhere at this same time on a practical plane. At nearby Horn castle, Sir Edward or his men made entry into the parsonage to claim "diverse duties" which according to the Earl belonged by right to him. Then five weeks later, on the last Sunday in August, Talboys Dymoke "did frame and make a stage play to be played in for sport and merriment at the setting up of a Maypole in South Kyme" (p. II4). Neighbors were invited "to take part at some venison" at the house of John Cradock the elder, "yeoman, servant to" Sir Edward Dymoke, and in the afternoon they saw "an interlude" "hard by a Maypole standing upon the green." "Talboys Dymoke, being the then principal actor... , did first ... counterfeit the person of (the Earl) and his speeches and gesture, and then and there termed and named . . . the Earl of Lincoln, his good uncle, in scornful manner, and as actor (he) then took upon him . . . representing (the Earl) fetched away by ... Roger Bayard, who acted ... the Devil. And . . . Roger Bayard in another part of the play did . . . represent ...the part of the Fool, and the part of the Vice ... and there acting the ... part did declare his last will and testament and ... did bequeath his wooden dagger to ... the Earl of Lincoln, and his cockscomb and bauble unto all those that would not go to Horncastle with ... Sir Edward Dymoke against him" ... And in the interlude there was "a dirge sung by Talboys Dymoke ... and other the ... actors ... wherein they expressed by name most of the known lewd and licentious women in the cities of London and Lincoln and town of Boston, concluding in their songs after every of their names, ora pro nobis." (p. II5) (43) The defense of the Dymoke party was that the play was traditional, a part of the games, with no allusions to the Earl. Dymoke "of himself termed (it) the Death of the Lord of Kyme, because the same day should make an end of the summer lord game in South Kyme for that year" (p. 114). Dickinson testified that about "a fortnight before the day" Talboys Dymoke left at his house "a certain writing in English, some part whereof was in verse or rhymes, which (Dickinson) doth not now perfectly remember, with request that (he) would learn the same without book." But Dymoke insisted that he and the others were simply playing customary roles, explaining the remark about "his good uncle" as a reference to the summer lord of the next village. The author of the play testified that he "did represent and take upon him the title and term of Lord Pleasure ... and did call the Lord of North Kyme (being another summer lord that year) my Uncle Prince," and he did not do this "in scornful manner." ... Roger Bayard as the Fool "Did bequeath his wooden dagger to the Lord of North Kyme because he had the day before called the Lord of South Kyme piebald knave." Dickinson declared that Bayard spoke "these words in rhyme: ... That Lord shall it have Which called the Lord of Kyme piebald knave, whereunto ... Talboys answered, that same was his good uncle." According to their testimony, it was not Dymoke playing the Earl that the Devil carried off, but John Cradock, the younger "(being before the Summer Lord of Kyme) and acting that part in the play," was "feigned to be poisoned and so carried forth" (p. II7). (44) There is not evidence to determine how commonly this sort of Death of the Summer Lord served as the finale of the season's games. It must have been fairly common, or Dymoke's group could not have relied for their defense on the traditional character of such a play. But the only other case I have run onto is Nashe's far more sophisticated Summer's Last Will and Testament. Certainly, the particular formulae which Dymoke combined were thoroughly traditional. The Vice or clown was still being carried off the London stage by the Devil in the period when Shakespeare's first plays were appearing; the burlesque testament was also a hardy perennial. The dirge was an equally popular form for satiric burlesque; in the South Kyme performance it was combined with listing actual people by their names in what was sometimes called a "ragman's roll" (with perhaps the implication that the "known lewd women" would be appropriate mourners for the Lord of Kyme, having been close to him during his life).' To conclude the career of a mummery lord by a death and dirge, was, moreover, an obvious move for people familiar with accounts of notable deaths in the literature of the Ars Moriendi. Winter reigns of Lords of Misrule might end with formal mourning: for example, the "Christmas Lord, or Prince of the Revels" whose rule after a lapse of thirty years was elaborately revived at St. John's, Oxford, in I607, reigned through the winter until Shrove Tuesday, when "after a show called Ira seu Tumulus Fortunae, the Prince was conducted to his private chamber in mourning procession" and there expired." Jack a Lent was another such figure liable to feel Fortune's Wrath. Henry Machyn noted in his diary how on the 17th of March, 1553, in a magnificent London procession which included giants great and small, hobby-horses, "my lo(rd) late being lord of misrule," and the Devil and the Sultan, there came a priest "shreeving Jack of Lent on horseback, and a doctor his physician, and then Jack of Lent's wife brought him his physician and bad save his life, and he should a thousand pounds for his labour. . . .'" This was in the brief heyday which the reign of Edward VI granted to old- 4 Baskervill has
a packed discussion
of the ragman's
roll in Jig, pp.
22-23: Udall used the
term, which is
associated with misrule,
to translate fescennina carmina
in the Apophthegmes
of Erasmus; a fifteenth-century poem
called Ragman Roll is "a
series of satiric sketches of women
which are represented as drawn by lot at the command of King Ragman Holly, obviously a Christmas
festival leader presiding over the
medieval game of fortune drawing.) 5 Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, I, 410.
See the discussion of the death of Carnival, below, pp. 206 and
213. 6
The Diary of Henry
Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (London,
1948), p. 33 (45) fashioned pageantry in London; but what the city elaborated on a splendid scale then, were holiday games which continued to be customary in humbler places. Also during Edward's reign, Bishop Gardiner complained that satirists had attacked the discipline of Lent by publishing "Jack of Lent's Testament." Somerset reassured him that "Lent remaineth still ... although some light and lewd men do bury him in writing."' As we shall see in the next section, a satirist also “buried in writing" the Puritan "Jack," Martin Marprelate. It is unfortunate for us that Dickinson did not repeat more than a scrap of the verses Talboys wrote for him-- though no doubt it was wise for Dickinson to forget them. We do get a little of the actual language of a mock funeral sermon which Talboys added to the program. It was "an old idle speech which was made two or three years before," which John Cradock's father, the bailiff, was persuaded to deliver on the spur of the moment, after the play was over. In the heavy language of the Earl's Bill of Complaint, John Cradock the elder ... in frown of religion, and the profession thereof, being attired in a minister's gown and having a corner cap on his head, and a book in his hand opened, did ... in a pulpit made for that purpose, deliver and utter a profane and irreligious prayer .... (p. II8) The opening of the fustian prayer, which Cradock read out of a "paper book," went De profundis pro defunctis. Originally the sermon had been delivered "about Christmas," "in the presence of ... Sir Edward and a number of gentlemen there assembled." This information was furnished by the testimony of a pious neighbor, Robert Hitchcock, who heard it from another neighbor, and who added, "all which manner 7 Baskervill,
Jig, p. 47 (46) of counterfeiting was by many godly ministers held to be very blasphemous" (p. I22). It seems likely that the sermon was originally spoken at the end of the rule of a Christmas prince. Another scrap of the sermon's language also suggests an indoor feast: "The mercy of Mustardseed and the blessing of Bullbeef and the peace of Potluck be with you all. Amen." (p. I 20) In an age when everybody had to hear long sermons, the minister's hour-glass must often have been the focus of the congregation's attention; it is easy to see why a crowd would enjoy seeing Sir Edward's bailiff wearing "a counterfeit beard, and, standing in a pulpit fixed to the Maypole on Kyme green, having ... a pot of ale or beer hanging by him instead of an hourglass, whereof he ... did drink at the concluding of any point or part of his speech" (p. I20). The speech was organized like a proper sermon, but its divisions were filled with merry morals, tales and local folklore. the said person did read a text which he said was taken out of the Heteroclites ...viz., "Cesar Dando sublevando, ignoscendo gloriam adeptus est, and did English it thus: Bayard's Leap of Ancaster hath the bownder stone in Bollingsbrookes farm. I say the more knaves the honester men." And the ... parson then divided his text into three parts, viz., the first, a colladacion (collation?) of the ancient plane of Ancaster Heath; the second, an ancient story of Mab as an appendix, and the third, concluding knaves honest men by an ancient story of The Friar and The Boy. (p. I20) Though it is not possible to get the comic point of all this, it is clear that a main part of the fun for the audience lay in encountering familiar and unpretentious lore in a form where normally the matter would be religious or moral and require constraint. Mr. O'Conor found accounts of Bayard's Leap which described it as a lonely house on an old Roman road, the haunt of a witch, and also the place where four holes in the ground were left by the hooves of the magic horse, Bayard, in taking a prodigious leap. Other testimony in the Star Chamber records makes it clear that the Heteroclites-- a surprisingly sophisticated word for "deviations from the standards"-- was by another name the [ 47 l Book of Mab. There is of course no need to assume an influence from Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night's Dream; three witnesses take "the book of Mab" in stride, apparently using the phrase as a general name for the strange and fantastic among stories and beliefs. The ancient story of the Friar and the Boy, on the other hand, was a particular narrative and has survived. It is the sort of merry tale that fits the holiday mood of rebuking niggardliness and, broadly, the proposition that knaves are honest men. The Boy triumphs over his begrudging Stepmother and her ally the Friar, thanks to the magic of a kind stranger with whom he shares his food; by the magic, it happens that whenever the Stepmother glares at the Boy, she involuntarily and thunderously breaks wind; moreover, whenever the Boy plays on a magic pipe, everybody, however malicious, has to dance-- the Stepmother, the Judge to whom she appeals, and the Friar, who dances himself into a thorn bush. Mr. O'Conor points out that one further offense charged by the Earl concerned the posting of a bill of defiance by Talboys Dymoke: "At the time that the May-game sports were used in South Kyme" he "did make and write a rhyme" which he "did fix and nail upon the Maypole." These lines, in the allegorical fashion typical of the age, referred to the fact that the Earl "had purchased a messuage, and certain lands, in Kyme ... of one Ambrose Marshe, Sir Edward Dymoke, and Talboys Dymoke," signifying by the ban dog (a dog chained to guard a house, or else because of his ferocity) the Earl, who had for his crest a white greyhound. According to Talboys Dymoke, the bull was "the cognizance of the town of Kyme ... And ... the Lord of the ... May game John Cradock, the younger, did subscribe to the ... rhyme with these words, 'Lord Cradock.'" (p. I22) The elder Cradock's testimony gave "the bull" a more particular meaning as "the only device" of Talboys Dymoke. So the lines which follow, though written presumably by Talboys Dymoke, are addressed, in the running fiction of the game, from the May- game Lord, Cradock, to his henchman or champion or champion in-arms, Tom Bull Dymoke: s
The Frere and tlte Boye
({(printed at London
in Fleet Street
by Wynkyn de Warde, about
the year 15n"), ed. Francis Jenkinson
(Cambridge, Eng., 1907). [ 48 ] The Bandog now,
Tom Bull, comes to our town, Here, as elsewhere, the "summer lord game" permits Dymoke, clearly the moving spirit, to project his feelings towards the Earl into a dramatic fiction in which he and his feelings become only a part of the composition. The Earl's lawyers, concerned to demonstrate damage by individuals to an individual, insisted that the show was directed entirely at Lincoln. Actually, it is clear that the Earl was caught in a wheel of merriment which had been turning before he came along and which kept turning after he had been flung off. The fustian sermon had nothing to do with Lincoln; yet Talboys Dymoke came to Cradock's house after the play was over "and very much begged him to come unto the ... green and there to deliver an old idle speech"-- not to finish off the Earl, but to finish off the occasion, the whirling composition. When in 1610 the Star Chamber handed down a judgment in Lincoln's favor, the consequences for the Dymoke family and their yeomen friends were drastic. Talboys himself had died by I603, but the court provided that Roger Bayard, John Cradock, and Marmaduke Dickinson, being the chief actors, be committed to the Fleet, led through West minster Hall with papers, and there to be set on the pillory, and afterwards to be whipped under the pillory; also to be set in the pillory at the assizes in Lincolnshire and acknowledge their offenses and ask God and the Earl forgiveness, and then to be whipped under the pillory, and to pay 300 pounds apiece line, and be bound to good behavior before enlargement. That Sir Edward Dymoke, who was privy and consenting to the offenses ... be committed to the Fleet during the King's pleasure and pay 1000 pounds fine. (p. I25) (49) The Dymoke party had pleaded that all was done "in a merriment at the time of the ... May games" (p. 124). The humiliations and ruinous fines imposed show how little such a plea availed in the cold, sober, authoritarian atmosphere of the Council sitting as the Star Chamber. It may be, as Mr. O'Conor 1610 worked to the detriment of the Dymokes; the court's judgment stressed the outrage done religion by Cradock's sermon. But the same sort of discontinuity was present I think throughout the reign of Elizabeth, between what would be tolerated in the festive liberties of settled local groups who did not need to fear mirth, and what would be made of these same liberties if they came to be brought before the highly moral royal council or before a court. The official world, highly conscious of the disruptive potentialities of innovation, assumed that a constant vigilance was needed to cope with things done "in frown of religion" and in contempt of "respective and due observance of the nobles." Incongruities between the official and the informal are always present, of course; but they were made more marked in Elizabethan times by the difference between tradition-directed local communities, which could accommodate holiday license, and the centers of change and growth, which were anxiously involved in innovating and resisting innovation. Early in Elizabeth's reign an episode is recorded which makes clear how, where innovation is a possibility, saturnalian inversion becomes suspect. In 1564, a group of ardently Protestant Cambridge men, disappointed in their hope of performing a piece before Elizabeth as part of the festivities of her Cambridge visit, followed her to Hinchinbrook, and secured her permission to present their satire after all: The actors came in dressed as some of the imprisoned Catholic Bishops. First came the Bishop of London (i.e. Bonner) carrying a lamb in his hands as if he were eating it as he walked along, and then others with different devices, one being in the figure of a dog with the Host in his mouth.' Elizabeth was outraged by this burlesque of the Mass, and abruptly quitted the chamber, taking the torchbearers with her and leaving the would-be satirists in the dark. They had tried a kind of game which had been tolerated in feasts of fools before the status of the mass became an issue, in the days when a reduction of the ceremony to the physical could only be read as the expression of a saturnalian mood. But in 1564 their burlesque was a taking advantage of holiday to advocate doctrinal revision at issue in every day controversy. Elizabeth had sanctioned for the first masque of her reign, on Twelfth Night, 1559, a masquerade of crows, asses, and wolves as cardinals, bishops, and abbots." But 1559 was, within limits, a revolutionary moment, and saturnalia, within limits, could serve it. Thereafter, as Elizabeth's response at Hinchinbrook testifies, the precarious religious settlement made religion an area where the authorities were particularly vigilant to exclude temporary, festive revolutions for fear that they might lead on to permanent revolutionary consequences. 9 Baskervill
1 p. 5 r; see also Chambers 1 Elizabethan Stage, 1 128. (50) The May
Game of Martin Marprelate It is beyond my scope here to try to do justice, even in summary, to the way the holiday games contributed to the popular comedy of jig, interlude, clown's recitation, and flyting. As Baskervill's work shows almost poignantly, the evidence of this sort of influence is extraordinarily widespread-- and tantalizing cryptic. To look briefly at the use of May-game motifs in the Martin Marprelate controversy, however, can serve to provide a sort of spot sample of the relation of the stage to holiday at the formative period of the drama, the end of the decade of the 1580’s. As Dover Wilson has remarked, the gifted Puritan satirist who masqueraded as Martin Marprelate used a humorous style which was "that of the stage monologue ... , with asides to the audience and a variety of 'patter' in the form of puns, ejaculations and references to current events and persons of popular rumor .''11 10 Elizabethan Stage,
I, 155. 11 The Cambridge History of English
Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller
(New York 1 1933), m, 436. (51) Francis Bacon, writing in the year of the controversy, deplored "this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage." Martin's huff-snuff tone was taken up by his opponents. Like much of the other satire of the period, the Martinist and anti-Martinist pamphlets show a curious mingling of buffoonery and invective, of relish for the opponent with scorn, which goes with the satirist's playing the fool to make a fool of his antagonist. The likeness of this tone to a Lord of Misrule's vaunting and abuse is suggested by several passages alluding to the games. Thus Pasquill of England swaggers on to a title page to challenge Martin Junior like one Summer Lord challenging another: A countercuff given to Martin Junior, by the venturous, hardy, and renowned Pasquill of England, Cavaliere. Not of old Martin's making, which newly knighted the Saints in Heaven with rise up Sir Peter and Sir Paul; but lately dubbed for his service at home in the defense of his country, and for the clean breaking of his staff upon Martin's face." The knighting of boon companions was a tavern game in which "Rise up, Sir Robert Tosspot" was a formula; here Martin is pictured as a Lord of Misrule who presumes to dub the very saints in heaven cavalieros in his retinue. Elsewhere Pasquill asks his friend Marforius to "set up ... at London stone" a bill, called "Pasquill's Protestation," enlisting aid against Martin: "Let it be done solemnly with drum and trumpet, and look you advance my colors on the top of the steeple right over against it."" This is a procedure like Lord Cradock's defiant rhyme on the Maypole at South Kyme. Opponents are sometimes spoken of-- or to-- as though they were a Vice or clown, or other stock figure of the stage or the games: Now Tarleton's
dead, the consort lacks a vice: 12 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV1 229
and also 1, 294. 13 McKerrow, Nashe, I, 57 H "The Returne
of the Renowned Cavaliere Pasquil,
in in The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London,
r88 3-84), I, I35-1 3 6. 16 Quoted by Chambers, Elizabethan
Stage, IV, from A Whip for an Ape: Or Martin Displaied.
Chambers reprints many relevant excerpts in "Documents of Criticism/'
IV, 229-233; it was in reading this collection that I was first struck with
the prominence of holiday motifs in the controversy. [52] The actors did in fact take the opportunity to put Martin on the stage, probably as the subject for jigs or other brief afterpieces. The anatomy lately taken of him, the blood and the humours that were taken from him, by lancing and worming him at London upon the common stage ... are evident tokens that, being thorough soused with so many showers, he had no other refuge but to run into a hole and die as he lived, belching. This dramatization of Martin's illness was referred to also in another pamphlet, which observed that Martin "took it very grievously, to be made a May game upon the stage," specifying "The Theater." A satirical excursion, called "A true report of the death and burial of Martin Marprelate," amounts to a description of a playlet in which Martin is put through stages included in Dymoke's "Death of the Lord of Kyme" and Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament. Martin grows sick, with allegorically appropriate ills; he gives repentant advice to his sons, in a burlesque in the manner of men dying in the Ars Moriendi literature; he makes his testament, including the bequest of "all his foolery" to the player Lanam; he dies, is allegorically anatomized, buried in a dunghill, and honoured with a collection of mock epitaphs and a jingling Latin dirge. The phrase "to make a May game" of somebody implies that one need only bring an antagonist into the field of force of May games to make him ridiculous. A pamphlet promises its readers a "new work" entitled The May game of Martinism and gives a preview which is worth quoting in full as an example of the practice of mocking individuals by identifying them with traditional holiday roles. Various prominent Puritans, along with Martin, are put in the game: 16 Elizabethan Stage,
IV, 231 1 from A
Countercuffe given to Martin Junior: .. by Pasquill of
England, in McKerrow, Nashe,
r, 59• 17 Elizabethan Stage, rv, 230, from Martins Months Minde in Grosart, Nas!te, I,I7 5. 18 In Martins Months Minde (1589), reprinted
in Grosart, Nashe, I,
168. Bishop Bonner was
satirized by a
similar burlesque Commemoration described
by Baskervill (Jig, p. 5 I) as "in the
vein of burlesques designed for feasts of misrule." (53) Penry the Welshman is the forgallant of the Morris, with the treble bells, shot through the wit with a Woodcock's bill. I would not for the fairest hornbeast in all his country, that the Church of England were a cup of Metheglin, and came in his way when he is over-heated! Every bishopric would prove but a draught, when the mazer is at his nose. Martin himself is the Maid Marian, trimly dressed up in a cast gown, and a kercher of Dame Lawson's, his face handsomely muffied with a diaper napkin to cover his beard, and a great nosegay in his hand, of the principalest flowers I could gather out of all his works. Wiggenton dances round about him in a cotton coat, to court him with a leathern pudding and a wooden ladle. Pagit marshalleth the way, with a couple of great clubs, one in his foot, another in his head; and he cries to the people with a loud voice, "Beware of the man whom God hath marked." I cannot yet find any so fit to come lagging behind, with a budget on his neck, to gather the devotion of the lookers on, as the stock-keeper of the Bride well-house of Canterbury; he must carry the purse, to defray their charges, and then he may be sure to serve himself. The vivid description of such business as the wooing of a bearded Maid Marian suggests how, quite apart from any ridicule of persons, the performers would farce their roles just for the fun of it. To make such farce into satire of a sort, or more properly, into festive abuse, Nashe or whoever wrote the pamphlet needed only to add proper names and a few scurrilous allusions like the reference to Pagit's club foot. It is striking that the May game of Martin is promised as a show rather than a pamphlet, "very deftly set out, with pomps, pageants, motions, masks, scutchions, emblems, impresses, strange tricks, and devices, between the Ape and the Owl, the like was never yet seen in Paris Garden." Stage and holiday were thus close enough together to admit the envisaging of a show, fairly similar in character to the Morris dance and marching of a summer lord game, as an entertainment to rival those of the Bear Garden. Stage satire and holiday abuse are spoken of in one breath by Gabriel Harvey when, taking his cue from the notion of a May game of Martinism, he heaps scorn on the unworthiness of the spokesmen by whom the established church has answered Martin's attacks: 19 The
Returne
of the renouned Cavaliero Pasquil of
England (1589) in McKerrow, Nashe, I, 83. Also printed in Elizabethan Stage, IV, 231. (54) Had I been Martin ... it should have been one of my May games, or August triumphs, to have driven Officials, Commissaries, Archdeacons, Deans, Chancellors, Suffragans, Bishops and Archbishops (so Martin would have flourished at the least) to entertain such an odd, light-headed fellow for their defense: a professed jester, a Hickscorner, a scoff-master, a playmonger, an interlude... 20 Here Martin is set up explicitly as a summer lord; he defies his enemies with a "flourish"; reference to his "August triumphs" suggests Talboys' sort of Sunday marching. Harvey is saying that the bishops have descended to Martin's level, but, significantly, he doesn't put it that way; instead he says that they have entered Martin's May game. They do so by having recourse to a May game sort of fellow, a professed jester, a scoffmaster, a playmonger. Foolery and comedy are equivalent: "I am threatened with a bauble, and Martin menaced with a comedy," Harvey writes, and goes on to describe ironically a reign of terror by those “that have the stage a commandment, and can furnish-out Vices, and Devils at their pleasure.” The stage satire of Martin is referred to as Vetus Comoedia in the same Pasquill pamphlet which describes the May game of Martinism: Methought Vetus Comoedia began to prick him at London in the right vein, when she brought forth Divinity with a scratched face, holding her heart as if she were sick, because Martin would have forced her, but missing of his purpose, he left the print of his nails upon her cheeks, and poisoned her with a vomit which he ministered unto her, to make her cast up her dignities and promotions. 22 Vetus Comoedia certainly was an apt term for the theater's way of making a May game of Martin. Such a rough and ready symbolic figure as Divinity is comparable to, say, Aristophanes' Peace; while Martin, when he played opposite to Divinity and tried to force her, must have been a manic sort of clown similar to, say, the 20 Elizabethan Stage, IV,
232 1 from G.
Harvey, An Advertisement
for Papp Hatchett. 21 Elizabethan Stage, IV,
233 (55) Sausage Seller in the Knights. Aristophanes' use of traditional formulae or scenarios, such as the alazons' interrupting the feast and being thrown out by the eiron hero, is similar to the use of the device of carrying Martin off on the Devil's back. To enact physically a phrase normally used figuratively, like "cast up" dignities, is thoroughly Aristophanic, as is also the connecting of several such fancies into an allegorical plot which is grossly physical in execution. A connection of the Old Comedy sort of mockery with country merriments is suggested near the end of the Anti-Martinist dialogue, when Pasquill asks "But who cometh yonder, Maforius, can you tell me?” and Marforius sees Vetus Comoedia coming with a garland, apparently dancing: MARFORIUS. By her gait and her garland I know her well, it is Vetus Comoedia. She hath been so long in the country, that she is somewhat altered. This is she that called in a council of physicians about Martin, and found by the sharpness of his humour, when they had opened the vein that feeds his head, that he would spit out his lungs within one year.... PASQUILL. I have a tale to tell her in her ear, of the sly practice that was used in restraining of her. The remark that "she hath been so long in the country" seems to imply that the sort of drastic ad hominem ridicule practiced on Martin had come to be confined to the frank country world, the world of Talboys Dymoke. After a summer of manhandling Martin, the players had been brought up short by the authorities, as Pasquill was going "to tell her in her ear." Lyly in a pamphlet complained that if "these comedies might be allowed to be played that are penned, ... (Martin) would be deciphered." But instead of welcoming the players' help against the government's Puritan opponent, the Master of the Revels arranged for Burghley to permit the stage's enemy, the Lord Mayor, to prohibit all theatrical exhibitions. And shortly afterwards the Privy Council directed that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor appoint representatives to work with the Master of the Revels in passing on the books of plays and striking out or correcting "such parts or matters as they shall find unfit and undecent to be handled in plays, both for Divinity and State.” Here again the Aristophanic impulse, when directly expressed, ran head on into official prohibition. To find expression, saturnalia had to shift from symbolic action towards symbolic action, from abuse directed from the stage at the world to abuse directed by one stage figure at another. 23 Ibid. 25 Elizabethan Stage,
I, 295. Chambers handles the dramatic part of the Mar prelate controversy as
an episode in "The Struggles of Court and City.n
McKer row's account is in his Nashe,
IV, 44• Baskervill relates the pamphleteers' descrip tions of stage satires
to other similar shows in Jig, pp. 50-55• (56) Chapter 6
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
IF Shakespeare had called A Midsummer Night's Dream by a title that referred to pageantry and May games, the aspects of it with which I shall be chiefly concerned would be more often discussed. To honor a noble wedding, Shakespeare gathered up in a play the sort of pageantry which was usually presented piece-meal at aristocratic entertainments, in park and court as well as in hall. And the May game, everybody's pastime, gave the pattern for his whole action, which moves "from the town to the grove" and back again, bringing in summer to the bridal. These things were familiar and did not need to be stressed by a title.
Shakespeare's
young men and maids, like those Stubbes described in May games, "run
gadding over night to the woods, . . . where they spend the whole night
in pleasant pastimes" and in the fierce vexation which
often goes with the pastimes of falling in and out of love and
threatening to fight about it. "And no marvel," Stubbes exclaimed about
such headlong business, "for there is a great Lord present among them,
as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports, namely,
Satan, prince of hell.” In making Oberon, prince of fairies, into the
May king, Shakespeare urbanely plays with the notion of a supernatural
power at work in holiday: he presents the common May game presided over
by an aristocratic garden god. Titania is a Summer Lady ‘who waxeth
wounder proud’:
[ II9 ]
And Puck, as jester, promotes the "night-rule" version of misrule over which Oberon is superintendent and lord in the "haunted grove." The lovers originally meet
in the wood, a league without the town,
Next morning, when Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers sleeping, it is after their own early "observation is performed"-- presumably some May-game observance, of a suitably aristocratic kind, for Theseus jumps to the conclusion that
No doubt they rose up early to observe
These lines need not mean that the play's action happens on May Day. Shakespeare does not make himself accountable for exact chronological inferences; the moon that will be new according to Hippolyta will shine according to Bottom's almanac. And in any case, people went Maying at various times, "Against May, Whit sunday, and other time" is the way Stubbes puts it. This Maying can be thought of as happening on a midsummer night, even on Midsummer Eve itself, so that its accidents are complicated by the delusions of a magic time. (May Week at Cambridge University still comes in June.) The point of the allusions is not the date, but the kind of holiday occasion.2 The Maying is completed when Oberon and Titania with their trains come into the great chamber to bring the blessings of
2 A great deal of misunderstanding has come from the assumption of commentators that a Maying must necessarily come on May Day, May 1. The confusion that results is apparent throughout Furness' discussion of the title and date in his preface to the Variorum edition. He begins by quoting Dr. Johnson downright: "I know not why Shakespeare calls this play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' when he so carefully informs us that it happened on the night preceding May day" (p. v.).
[ 120 ]
fertility. They are at once common andspecial, a May king and queen making their good luck visit to the manor house, and a pair of country gods, half-English and half-Ovid, come to bring their powers in tribute to great lords and ladies.
The
play's relationship to pageantry is most prominent in the scene where
the fairies are introduced by our seeing their quarrel. This encounter
is the sort of thing that Elizabeth and the wedding party might have
happened on while walking about in the park during the long summer
dusk. The fairy couple accuse each other of the usual weakness of
pageant personages-- a compelling love for royal
personages :
Why art thou here,
Oberon describes an earlier entertainment, very likely one in which the family of the real-life bride or groom had been concerned:
My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb'rest
At the entertainment at Elvetham in 1591, Elizabeth was throned by the west side of a garden lake to listen to music from the water; the fairy queen came with a round of dancers and spoke of herself
[ 121 ]
as wife to Auberon. These and other similarities make it quite possible, but not necessary, that Shakespeare was referring to the Elvetham occasion.3 There has been speculation, from Warburton on down, aimed at identifying the mermaid and discovering in Cupid's fiery shaft a particular bid for Elizabeth's affections; Leicester's Kenilworth entertainment in 1575 was usually taken as the occasion alluded to, despite the twenty years that had gone by when Shakespeare wrote.4 No one, however, has cogently demonstrated any reference to court intrigue-which is to be expected in view of the fact that the play, af ter its original per formance, was on the public stage. The same need for discretion probably accounts for the lack of internal evidence as to the par ticular marriage the comedy originally celebrated.5 But what is not in doubt, and what matters for our purpose here, is the kind of occasion Oberon's speech refers to, the kind of occasion Shake speare's scene is shaped by. The speech describes, in retrospect, just such a joyous overflow of pleasure into music and make-believe, as is happening in Shakespeare's own play. The fact that what Shakespeare handled with supreme skill was just what was most commonplace no doubt contributes to our inability to connect what he produced with particular historical circumstances.
As we have seen, it was commonplace to imitate Ovid. Ovidian fancies pervade A Midsummer Night's Dream, and especially the scene of the fairy quarrel: the description of the way Cupid "loos'd his love shaft" at Elizabeth parallels the Metamorphoses' account of the god's shooting "his best arrow, with the golden head" at Apollo; Helena, later in the scene, exclaims that "The story shall be chang'd:/ Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase"-- and proceeds to invert animal images from Ovid.6 The game was not so much to lift things gracefully from Ovid as it was to make up fresh things in Ovid's manner, as Shakespeare here, by playful mythopoesis, explains the bad weather by his fairies' quarrel and makes up a metamorphosis of the little Western flower to motivate
3 See E. K. Chambers, Shakespearean Gleanings (Oxford, 1944), pp. 63-64 ; and Venezky, Pageantry, pp. 140:ff.
[ 122 ]
the play's follies and place Elizabeth superbly above them.7 The pervasive Ovidian influence accounts for Theseus' putting fables and fairies in the same breath when he says, punning on ancient and antic,
I never may believe
The humor of the play relates superstition, magic and passionate delusion as "fancy's images." The actual title emphasizes a sceptical attitude by calling the comedy a "dream." It seems unlikely that the title's characterization of the dream, "a midsummer night's dream," implies association with the specific customs of Midsummer Eve, the shortest night of the year, except as "midsummer night" would carry suggestions of a magic time. The observance of Midsummer Eve in England centered on building bonfires or "bonefires," of which there is nothing in Shakespeare's moonlight play. It was a time when maids might find out who their true love would be by dreams or divinations. There were customs of decking houses with greenery and hanging lights, which just possibly might connect with the fairies' torches at the comedy's end. And when people gathered fern seed at midnight, sometimes they spoke of spirits whizzing invisibly past. If one ranges through the eclectic pages of The Golden Bough, guided by the index for Midsummer Eve, one finds other customs suggestive of Shakespeare's play, involving moonlight, seeing the moon in water, gathering dew, and so on, but in Sweden, Bavaria, or still more remote places, rather than England.8
7
See above, pp. 83f., for a similar compliment to the Queen by Nashe in
Summer's Last Will and Testament. Nashe also elaborates meteorology
into make believe: Summer blames the drying up of
the Thames and earlier flooding of it on
the pageant figure, Sol (McKerrow, Nashe, III,
250, 11. 541-565) .
Bright Luna spreads its light around,
At the fair June bonfire.
Although reported as "sung for a long series of years at Penzance and the neighbourhood," the piece obviously was written after Shakespeare's period. But the customs it describes in its rather crude way are interesting in relation to A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly the moonlight and dew, and the sun's beams coming to end it all.
[ 123 ]
One
can assume that parallel English customs have been lost, or
one can assume that Shakespeare's imagination found its way to
similarities with folk cult, starting from the custom
of Maying and the general feeling that spirits may be
abroad in the long dusks and short nights of midsummer. Olivia in Twelfth Night
speaks of "midsummer madness" ( IIl.iv.61). In the absence of
evidence, there is no way to settle just how much comes
from tradition. But what is clear is that Shakespeare
was not simply writing out folklore which he heard in his
youth, as Romantic critics liked to assume. On the contrary, his
fairies are produced by a complex fusion of pageantry and popular
game, as well as popular fancy. Moreover, as we shall see, they
are not serious in the menacing way in which the people's fairies were
serious. Instead they are serious in a
very different way, as embodiments of the May-game
experience oferos in men and women and trees and
flowers, while any superstitious tendency to believe in
their literal reality is mocked.
The whole night's action is presented as a release of shaping
fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong
imagination. We watch a dream; but we are awake, thanks to
pervasive humor about the tendency to take fantasy
literally, whether in love, in
superstition, or in Bottom's mechanical dramatics. As in Love's Labour's Lost
the folly of wit becomes the generalized comic subject in the course of
an astonishing release of witty invention, so here in the course of a
more inclusive release of imagination, the
folly of fantasy becomes the general subject, echoed back and
forth between the strains of the play's imitative
counterpoint.
The Fond Pageant
We can best follow first the strain of the lovers; then the fairies,their persuasive and then their humorous aspects; and finally the broadly comic strain of the clowns. We feel what happens to the young lovers in relation to the wedding of the Duke. Theseus and Hippolyta have a quite special sort of role: they are principals without being protagonists; the play happens for them rather than to them. This relation goes with their being stand-ins for the noble couple whose marriage the play originally honored. In expressing the prospect of Theseus' marriage, Shakespeare can fix in ideal form, so that it can be felt later at performance in the theater, the mood that would obtain in a palace as the "nuptial hour / Draws on apace." Theseus looks towards the hour with masculine impatience, Hippolyta with a woman's happy willingness to dream away the time. Theseus gives directions for the "four happy days" to his "usual manager of mirth," his Master of the Revels, Philostrate:
Go, Philostrate,
The whole community is to observe a decorum of the passions, with Philostrate as choreographer of a pageant where Melancholy's float will not appear. After the war in which he won Hippolyta, the Duke announces that he is going to wed her
in another key,
But
his large, poised line is interrupted by Egeus, panting out vexation.
After the initial invocation of nuptial festivity, we are confronted by
the sort of tension from which merriment is a release. Here is
Age, standing in the way of Athenian youth ; here are the
locked conflicts of everyday. By the dwelling
here on "the sharp Athenian law," on the fate of nuns
"in shady cloister mew'd," we are led
to feel the outgoing to the woods
as an escape from the inhibitions
imposed by parents
[ 125 ]
and the organizd comunity. And this sense of release is also prepred by looking for just a moment at the tragic potentialities of passion. Lysander and Hermia, left alone in their predicament, speak a plaintive, symmetrical duet on the theme, learned "from tale or history," that "The course of true love never did run smooth":
Lysander. But, either it was different in blood
Suddenly the tone changes, as Lysander describes in little the sort of tragedy presented in Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet exclaimed that their love was "Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say 'It lightens' " ( II.ii.I I 9-120).
Lysander. Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
But Hermia shakes herself free of the tragic vision, and they turn to thoughts of stealing forth tomorrow night to meet in the Maying wood and go on to . the dowager aunt, where "the sharp Athenian law / Cannot pursue us."
If they had reached . the wealthy aunt, the play would be a romance. But it is a change of heart, not a change of fortune, which lets love have its way. The merriments Philostrate was to have directed happen inadvertently, the lovers walking into them blind, so to speak. This is characteristic of the way game is transformed into drama in this play, by contrast with the disabling of the fictions in Love's Labour's Lost. Here the roles which the young people might play in a wooing game, they carry out in earnest. And anybody is shown setting about to play the parts of Oberon or Titania. Instead the pageant fictions are presented as "actually" happening-- at least so it seems at first glance.
[ 126 ]
We see the fairies meet by moonlight in the woods before we see the lovers arrive there, and so are prepared to see the mortals lose themselves. In The Winter's Tale, Perdita describes explicitly the transforming and liberating powers of the spring festival which in A Midsummer Night's Dream are embodied in the nightwood world the lovers enter. After Perdita has described the spring flowers, she concludes with
O, these I lack
Her
recovery is as exquisite as her impulse towards
surrender: she comes back to herself by seeing her gesture as the
expression of the occasion. She makes the festive clothes she wears
mean its transforming power. Florizel has
told her that
These your unusual weeds to each part of you
Holiday disguising, her humility suggests, would be embarrassing but for the license of the sheep-shearing feast:
But that our feasts
[127 ]
The lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream play "as in Whitsun pastorals," but they are entirely without this sort of consciousness of their folly. They are unreservedly in the passionate protestations which they rhyme at each other as they change partners:
Helena. Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake.
The result of this lack of consciousness is that they are often rather dull and undignified, since however energetically they elaborate conceits, there is usually no qualifying irony, nothing withheld. And only accidental differences can be exhibited, Helena tall, Hermia short. Although the men think that "reason says" now Hermia, now Helena, is "the worthier maid," personalities have nothing to do with the case: it is the flowers that bloom in the spring. The life in the lovers' parts is not to be caught in individual speeches, but by regarding the whole movement of the farce, which swings and spins each in turn through a common pattern, an evolution that seems to have an impersonal power of its own.
Miss Enid Welsford describes the play's movement as a dance:
The
plot is a pattern, a figure, rather than a series of
human events occasioned by character and passion, and this pattern,
especially in the moonlight parts of the
play, is the pattern of a dance.
"Enter a Fairie at one doore, and Robin Goodfellow at an other. . . . Enter the King of Fairies, at one doore, with his traine; and the Queene, at another with hers."
The appearance and disappearance and reappearance of the various lovers, the will-o'-the-wisp movement of the elusive Puck, form a kind of figured ballet. The lovers quarrel in a dance pattern : first, there are two men to one woman and the other woman alone, then a brief space of circular movement, each one pursuing and pursued, then a return to the first figure with the position of the woman reversed, then a cross-movement, man quarrelling with man and woman with woman, and then, as finale, a general setting to partners, including not only the lovers but fairies and royal personages as well.9
9 The Court Masque, pp. 331-332. Although Miss Welsford's perceptions about dance and revel make her account of A M idsummer Night's Dream extremely effective, the court masque, to which she chiefly refers it, is not really a formal prototype for this play. It is a direct and large influence in shaping The Tempest, and her account of that play brings out fundamental structure such as the early masterpiece gets from entertainment and outdoor holiday, not the court masque.
[128 ]
This is fine and right, except that one must add that the lovers' evoiutions have a headlong and helpless quality that depends on their not being intended as dance, by contrast with those of the fairies. (One can also contrast the courtly circle's intended though abortive dances in Love's Labour's Lost.) The farce is funniest, and most meaningful, in the climactic scene where the lovers are most unwilling, where they try their hardest to use personality to break free, and still are willy-nilly swept along to end in pitch darkness, trying to fight. When both men have arrived at wooing Helena, she assumes it must be voluntary mockery, a "false sport" fashioned "in spite." She appeals to Hermia on the basis of their relation as particular individuals, their "sister's vows." But Hermia is at sea, too; names no longer work: "Am I not Hermia? Are not you Lysander?" So in the end Hermia too, though she has held off, is swept into the whirl, attacking Helena as a thief of love. She grasps at straws to explain what has happened by something manageably related to their individual identities:
Helena. Fie, fie! You counterfeit, you puppet you.
In exhibiting a more drastic helplessness of will and mind than anyone experienced in Love Labour's Lost, this farce conveys a sense of people being tossed about by a force which puts them beside themselves to take them beyond themselves. The change that happens is presented simply, with little suggestion that it involves a growth in insight-- Demetrius is not led to realize something false in his
[ 129 ]
So we
grew together,
"To join with men" has a plaintive girlishness about it. But before the scramble is over, the two girls have broken the double-cherry bond, to fight each without reserve for her man. So they move from the loyalties of one stage of life to those of another. When it has happened, when they wake up, the changes in affections seem mysterious: So Demetrius says
But, my good lord, I wot not by what power
The comedy's irony about love's motives and choices expresses love's power not as an attribute of special personality but as an impersonal force beyond the persons concerned. The tragedies of love, by isolating Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, enlist our concern for love as it enters into unique destinies, and convey its subjective immensity in individual experience. The festive comedies, in presenting love's effect on a group, convey a different sense of its power, less intense but also less precarious.
In Love's Labour's Lost it was one of the lovers, Berowne, who was aware, in the midst of folly's game, that it was folly and a game; such consciousness, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is lodged outside the lovers, in Puck. It is he who knows "which way goes the game," as poor Hermia only thought she did. As a jester, and as Robin Goodfellow, games and practical jokes are his
[130 ]
great delight: his lines express for the audience the mastery that comes from seeing folly as a pattern:
Then will two at once woo one.
Like Berowne, he counts up the sacks as they come to Cupid's mill:
Yet but three? Come one more.
Females, ordinarily a graceless word, works nicely here because it includes every girl. The same effect is got by using the names Jack and Jill, any boy and any girl:
And the country proverb known,
The trailing off into rollicking doggerel is exactly right to convey a country-proverb confidence in common humanity and in what humanity have in common. The proverb is on the lovers' side, as it was not for Berowne, who had ruefully to accept an ending in which "Jack hath not Jill." A festive confidence that things will ultimately go right supports the perfect gayety and detachment with which Puck relishes the preposterous course they take:
Shall we their fond pageant see?
The pageant is "fond" because the mortals do not realize they are in it, nor that it is sure to come out right, since nature will have its way.
[ 131 ]
Bringing in Summer to the Bridal
Spenser's Epithalamion, written at about the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream, about 1595, is very like Shakespeare's play in the way it uses a complex literary heritage to express native English customs. In the course of fetching the bride to church and home again, Spenser makes the marriage a fulfillment of the whole countryside and community:
So goodly all agree with sweet consent,
A gathering in, like that of the May game, is part of this confluence:
Bring with you all the Nymphes that you can heare
The church of course is decked with garlands, and the bride, "being crowned with a girland greene," seems "lyke some mayden Queene." It is Midsummer. The pervasive feeling for the kinship of men and nature is what rings in the refrain:
That all the woods them answer and their echo ring.
Shakespeare, in developing a May-game action at length to express the will in nature that is consummated in marriage, brings out underlying magical meanings of the ritual while keeping always a sense of what it is humanly, as an experience. The way nature is felt is shaped, as we noticed in an earlier chapter, by the things that are done in encountering it.10 The woods are a region of passionate excitement where, as Berowne said, love "adds a precious seeing to the eye." This precious seeing was talked about but never realized in Love's Labour's Lost; instead we got wit. But now it is realized; we get poetry. Poetry conveys the experience of amorous tendency diffused in nature; and poetry, dance, gesture, dramatic fiction, combine to create, in the fairies, creatures who embody the passionate
10 See above, p. 20.
[132 ]
mind's elated sense of its own omnipotence. The woods are established as a region of metamorphosis, where in liquid moonlight or glimmering starlight, things can change, merge and melt into each other. Metamorphosis expresses both what love sees and what it seeks to do.
The opening scene, like an overture, announces this theme of dissolving, in unobtrusive but persuasive imagery. Hippolyta says that the four days until the wedding will "quickly steep themselves in night" and the nights "quickly dream away the time" (I.i.6-7)-- night will dissolve day in dream. Then an imagery of wax develops as Egeus complains that Lysander has bewitched his daughter Hermia, "stol'n the impression of her fantasy" (I.i.32 ). Theseus backs up Egeus by telling Hermia that
To you your father should be as a god;
The supposedly moral threat is incongruously communicated in lines that relish the joy of composing beauties and suggests a godlike, almost inhuman freedom to do as one pleases in such creation. The metaphor of sealing as procreation is picked up again when Theseus requires Hermia "to decide by the next new moon, / The sealing day betwixt my love and me" ( I.i.84-85). The consummation in prospect with marriage is envisaged as a melting into a new form and a new meaning. Helena says to Hermia that she would give the world "to be to you translated" (Li.191), and in another image describes meanings that melt from love's transforming power:
ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eyes,
The most general statement, and one that perfectly fits what we are to see in the wood when Titania meets Bottom, is
[ 133 ]
"The glimmering night" promotes transpositions by an effect not simply of light, but also of a half-liquid medium in or through which things are seen:
Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold
Miss
Caroline Spurgeon pointed to the moonlight in this play as one of
the earliest sustained effects of "iterative imagery."11
To realize how the effect is achieved, we have to recognize that the
imagery is not used simply to paint an external scene but to convey
human attitudes. We do not get simply "the glimmering
night," but
Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
The
liquid imagery conveys an experience of the skin, as well as the eye's
confusion by refraction. The moon "looks with a wat'ry eye" (III.i.203)
and "washes all the air" ( II.i.ro4) ; its sheen, becoming liquid pearl
as it mingles with dew, seems to get onto the eyeballs of the lovers,
altering them to reshape what they see, like the juice of the flower
with which they are "streaked" by Oberon and Puck. The climax of
unreason comes when Puck over casts the night to make it "black as
Acheron" ( IIl.ii.357 ; the lovers now experience only sound and touch,
running blind over uneven ground, through bog and brake, "bedabbled
with the dew and torn with briers" ( IIl.ii.442). There is nothing more
they can do until the return of light permits a return of
control: light is anticipated as "comforts from the East" (III.ii.432
), "the Morning's love" ( III.ii.389). The sun announces its coming in
a triumph
11 Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York, 1935), pp. 259-263.
[134 ]
of red and gold over salt green, an entire change of key from the moon's "silver visage in her wat'ry glass":
the eastern gate, all fiery red,
Finally Theseus comes with his hounds and his horns in the morning, and the lovers are startled awake. They find as they come to themselves that
These things seem small and undistinguishable,
The teeming metamorphoses which we encounter are placed, in this way, in a medium and in a moment where the perceived structure of the outer world breaks down, where the body and its environment interpenetrate in unaccustomed ways, so that th seeming separateness and stability of identity is lost.
The
action of metaphor is itself a process of
transposing, a kind of metamorphosis. There is less
direct description of external nature in the
play than one would suppose: much of the
effect of being in nature comes from imagery which endows it with
anthropomorphic love, hanging a wanton
pearl in every cowslip's ear. Titania
laments that
while
Hoary-headed frosts
earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
[ 135 ]
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
One could go on and on in instancing metamorphic metaphors. But one of the most beautiful bravura speeches can serve as an epitome of the metamorphic action in the play, Titania's astonishing answer when Oberon asks for the changeling boy:
Set your heart at rest.
The memory of a moment seemingly so remote expresses with plastic felicity the present moment when Titania speaks and we watch. It suits Titania's immediate mood, for it is a glimpse of
12 See above, pp. 115-116. A recurrent feature of the type of pastoral which begins with something like "As I walked forth one morn in May" is a bank of flowers "for love to lie and play on," such as Perdita speaks of. This motif appears in the "bank where the wild thyme blows" where Titania sleeps "lull'd in these flowers by dances and delight." In such references there is a magical suggestion that love is infused with nature's vitality by contact.
[ 136 ]
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die.
It is when the flower magic leads Titania to find a new object that she gives up the child (who goes now from her bower to the man's world of Oberon ). So here is another sort of change of heart that contributes to the expression of what is consummated in marriage, this one a part of the rhythm of adult life, as opposed to the change in the young lovers that goes with growing up. Once Titania has made this transition, their ritual marriage is renewed:
Now thou and I are new in amity,
The
final dancing blessing of the fairies,
"Through the house with glimmering light" (V.i.398 ), af
ter the lovers are abed, has been given meaning
by the symbolic action we have been describing: the fairies have been
made into tutelary spirits of fertility, so
that they can promise that
[ 137 ] the blots of Nature's hand
When merely read, the text of this episode seems somewhat bare, but its clipped quality differentiates the fairy speakers from the mortals, and anyway richer language would be in the way. Shakespeare has changed from a fully dramatic medium to conclude, in a manner appropriate to festival, with dance and song. It seems likely that, as Dr. Johnson argued, there were two songs which have been lost, one led by Oberon and the other by Titania.13 There were probably two dance evolutions also, the first a processional dance led by the king and the second a round led by the queen: Oberon's lines direct the fairies to dance and sing "through the house," "by the fire," "after me"; Titania seems to start a circling dance with "First rehearse your song by rote"; by contrast with Oberon's "after me," she calls for "hand in hand." This combination of processional and round dances is the obvious one for the occasion: to get the fairies in and give them something to do. But these two forms of dance are associated in origin with just the sort of festival use of them which Shakespeare is making. "The customs of the village festival," Chambers writes, "gave rise by natural development to two types of dance. One was the processional dance of a band of worshippers in progress round their boundaries and from field to field, house to house. . . . The other type of folk dance, the ronde or 'round,' is derived from the comparatively stationary dance of the group of worshippers around the more especially sacred objects of the festival, such as the tree or fire. The custom of dancing round the Maypole has been more or less preserved wherever the Maypole is known. But 'Thread the Needle' (a type of surviving processional dance) itself often winds up with a circular dance or ronde. . ." One can make too much of such analogies. But they do illustrate the rich traditional meanings available in the materials Shakespeare was handling.
13
See Variorum, p. 2 39, for Dr. Johnson's cogent note. Richmond Noble,
in Shakespeare's Use of Song (Oxford, 1923), pp. 5
5-57 , argues that the text as we have it is
the text of the song, without, I think, meeting the
arguments of Johnson and subsequent editors.
[ 138 ]
Puck's
broom is another case in point: it is
his property as a housemaid's sprite, "to sweep the
dust behind the door" (V.i.397) ; also it permits him to make "room,"
in the manner of the presenter of a holiday mummers' group. And with
the dust, out go evil spirits. Puck refers to "evil
sprites" let forth by graves, developing a momentary sense
of midnight terrors, of spirits that walk by night; then he promises
that no mouse shall disturb "this hallowed house." The exorcism of evil
powers complements the invocation of good. With their "field dew
consecrate," the fairies enact a lustration. Fertilizing and beneficent
virtues are in festival custom persistently attributed to dew gathered
on May mornings.15 Shakespeare's handling of nature has
infused dew in this play with the vital spirit of moist and
verdant woods. The dew is "consecrate" in this sense. But
the religious associations inevitably attaching to the word suggest
also the sanctification of love by marriage. It was
customary for the clergy, at least in important marriages, to bless the
bed and bridal couple with holy water. The benediction included
exorcism, in the Manual for the use of Salisbury a prayer to
protect them from what Spenser
called "evill sprights" and "things that be not" (ab omnibus fantasmaticis demonum illusionibus). 16 This
custom may itself be an ecclesiastical adaptation of a more
primitive bridal lustration, a water charm of which dew gathering on
May Day is one variant. Such a play as A Midsummer Night's Dream
is possible because the May and Summer Spirit, despite its pagan
affinities, is not conceived as necessarily in
opposition to the wholeness of traditional
Christian life. Magic as Imagination : The Ironic Wit
In
promoting the mastery of passion by expression, dramatic art can
provide a civilized equivalent for exorcism. The exorcism rep resented
as magically accomplished at the conclusion of the comedy is
accomplished, in another sense, by the whole dramatic action, as it
keeps moving through release to clarification. By embodying in the
fairies the mind's proclivity to court its own omnipotence, Shake
speare draws this tendency, this "spirit," out into the open. They have
the meaning they do only because we see them in the midst
of the metamorphic region we have
just considered-- removed
15 Ibid., 1, 122. 16 Variorum, p. 240.
[ 139 ]
The sceptical side of the play has been badly neglected because romantic taste, which first made it popular, wanted to believe in fairies. Romantic criticism usually praised A Midsummer Night's Dream on the assumption that its spell should be complete, and that the absolute persuasiveness of the poetry should be taken as the measure of its success. This expectation of unreserved illusion finds a characteristic expression in Hazlitt:
All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle is grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. Poetry and the stage do not agree well together . . . . Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offense given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells; on the stage it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but Fairies six feet high are so. 17
Hazlitt's
objections were no doubt partly justified by the elaborate methods of
nineteenth-century production. A superfluity of "actual impressions of
the senses" came into conflict with the poetry by attempting to
reduplicate it. But Hazlitt looks for a complete illusion of a
kind which Shakespeare's theater did not provide and
Shakespeare's play was not designed
to exploit; failing to find it
17 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) in The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930) , IV, 247-248 ; quoted in Variorum, pp. 299-300.
The extravagant subject matter actually led the dramatist to rely more heavily than elsewhere on a flexible attitude toward representation. The circumstances of the original production made this all the more inevitable: Puck stood in a hall familiar to the audience. We have noticed how in holiday shows, it was customary to make game with the difference between art and life by witty transitions back and forth between them. The aim was not to make the auditors "forget they are in a theater," but to extend reality into fiction. The general Renaissance tendency frankly to accept and relish the artificiality of art, and the vogue of formal rhetoric and "conceited" love poetry, also made for sophistication about the artistic process. The sonneteers mock their mythological machinery, only to insist the more on the reality of what it represents:
It is most true, what we call Cupid's dart,
Yet it is
True and most true, that I must Stella love.18
Shakespeare's auditors had not been conditioned by a century and a half of effort to achieve sincerity by denying art. Coleridge has a remark about the advantages that Shakespeare enjoyed as a dramatist which is particularly illuminating in connection with this feeling for art in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He observes that "the circumstances of acting were altogether different from ours; it was more of recitation," with the result that "the idea of the poet was always present.' 19 The nearly bare stage worked as Proust observed that the bare walls of an art gallery work, to isolate "the essential thing, the act of mind."
18 Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, No. V, in Arcadia, ,593, and Astrophel and Stella, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922) , p. 244.
[ 141 ]
It is "the act of mind" and "the idea of the poet" which are brought into focus when, at the beginning of the relaxed fifth act, Theseus comments on what the lovers have reported of their night in the woods. I shall quote the passage in full, despite its familiarity, to consider the complex attitude it conveys:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet (V.i.7-22)
The description of the power of poetic creation is so beautiful that these lines are generally taken out of context and instanced simply as glorification of the poet. But the praise of the poet is qualified in conformity with the tone Theseus adopts towards the lover and the madman. In his comment there is wonder, wonderfully expressed, at the power of the mind to create from airy nothing; but also recognition that the creation may be founded, after all, merely on airy nothing. Neither awareness cancels out the other. A sense of the plausible life and energy of fancy goes with the knowledge that often its productions are more strange than true.
Scepticism is explicitly crystallized out in the detente of Theseus' speech ; but scepticism is in solution throughout the play. There is a delicate humor about the unreality of the fairies even while they are walking about in a local habitation with proper names. The usual production, even now, rides rough-shod over this humor by
[ 142 ]
Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
As we watch the dream, the doubleness is made explicit to keep us aware that strong imagination is at work:
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
These conceits, half botany, half personification, are explicit about remaking nature's economy after the pattern of man's: "spots you see. / Those be rubies . . ." The same conscious double vision appears when Puck introduces himself:
sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl
The
plain implication of the lines, though Puck speaks
them, is that Puck does not really exist-- that he is a figment of
naive imagination, projected to motivate the little accidents of
household life.
[ 143 ]
20 The Elizabethan Fairies, The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare : New York, 1930), Ch. V and passim. Professor Latham's excellent study points out in detail how Shakespeare, in keeping such features of popular superstition as, say, the taking of changelings, entirely alters the emphasis, so as to make the fairies either harmless or benign, as Titania is benign in rearing up the child of her dead vot'ress "for her sake." Dr. Latham develops and documents the distinction, recognized to a degree (by some commentators from the time of Sir Walter Scott) between the fairies of popular belief and those of Dream. In particular she emphasizes that, in addition to being malicious, the fairies of common English belief were large enough to be menacing (Ch. II and passim). This difference in size fits with everything else-- though it is not borne out by quite all of the evidence, especially if one considers, as Dr. Louis Wright has suggested to me in conversation, that Warwick is close enough to Wales to have possibly been influenced by Welsh traditions. (We have no direct knowledge, one way or the other, about Warwickshire lore in the Elizabethan period.)
Although Dr. Latham summarizes the appearances of fairies in entertainment pageantry, she does not consider the influence of this tradition, nor of the May game, in shaping what Shakespeare made of his fairies-- or more accurately, in shaping what Shakespeare made of his play and so of the fairies in it. But her book made a decisive, cogent contribution to a subject that is of ten treated with coy vagueness. She surveys in Ch. VI the traditions current before Shakespeare about Robin Goodfellow, pointing out that he had not been a native of fairyland until Shakespeare made him so, but "occupied the unique position of the national practical joker" (p. 223).
[ 144 ]
The settled content of regular pastoral is possible because it is a "low" content, foregoing wealth and position; Shakespeare's fairies too can have their fine freedom because their sphere is limited. At times their tiny size limits them, though this is less important than is generally suggested by summary descriptions of "Shakespeare's fairy race." The poet plays the game of diminution delightfully, but never with Titania and Oberon, only with their attendants, and not all the time with them. It seems quite possible that Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed were originally played by children of the family-- their parts seem designed to be foolproof for little children: "Ready -.-And I. --And 1, --And I." Diminutiveness is the characteristic of the Queen Mab Mercutio describes in Romeo and Juliet, and, as Dr. Latham has shown, it quickly became the hallmark of the progeny of literary fairies that followed; 21 but it is only occasionally at issue in A Mid summer Night's Dream. More fundamental is their limited time. Oberon can boast that, by contrast with horrors who must "wilfully themselves exile from light,"
21 Dr. Latham ( Fairies, pp. 194-216) traces the way fairies derived from Shakespeare were perpetuated by Drayton and William Browne and others by elaborating conceits about their small size and their relationship to flowers. She develops the point that other writers had suggested earlier, that Shakespeare's influence soon altered popular conceptions of the fairies-- and in the process of making them benign and tiny, made them purely literary creatures, without a hold on belief.
[ 145 ] I with the Morning's love have oft made sport ;
But
for all his pride, full daylight is beyond him: "But notwith standing,
haste; . . . We must effect this business yet ere day." The
enjoyment of any sort of
pastoral depends on an implicit recognition
that it presents a hypothetical case as if it were actual. Puck's
lines about the way the fairies run
From the presence of the sun,
summarizes the relation between their special time and their limited sort of existence.
This explicit summary comes at the close, when the whole machinery is being distanced to end with "If we shadows have offended. . . ." But the consciousness and humor which I am concerned to underline are present throughout the presentation of the fairies. It has been easy for production and criticism to ignore, just because usually amusement is not precipitated out in laughter but remains in solution with wonder and delight. In the scene of the quarrel between Titania and Oberon, the fragility of the conceits correspond finely to the half-reality of their world and specialness of their values. The factitiousness of the causes Titania lays out for the weather is gently mocked by the repeated therefore's: "Therefore the winds . . . Therefore the moon . . . The ox hath therefore. . . ." Her account makes it explicit that she and Oberon are tutelary gods of fertility, but with an implicit recognition like Sidney's about Cupid's dart-- "an image . . . which for ourselves we carve." And her emphasis makes the wheat blight a disaster felt most keenly not for men who go hungry but for the green wheat itself, because it never achieves manhood:
[ 146 ]
Her concern for the holiday aspect of nature is presented in lines whish are poised between sympathy and amusement:
The human mortals want their winter cheer;
Part
of the delight of this poetry is that we can enjoy
without agitation imaginative action of the
highest order. It is like gazing in a
crystal: what you see is clear and vivid, but
on the other side of the glass. Almost unnoticed,
the lines have a positive effect through the
amorous suggestion implicit in the
imagery, even while letting it be manifest that those concerned
are only personifications of flowers and a pageant figure wearing the
livery of the wrong season.
Titania can speak of "the human
mortals" as very far off indeed; the phrase crystallizes
what has been achieved in imaginative distance and
freedom. But Titania is as far off from us as
we are from her.
The
effect of wit which in such passages goes along with great
imaginative power is abetted by
the absence of any compelling
interest in passion or plot. Producers
utterly ruin the scene when they
have the fairy couple
mouth their lines at
each other as expressively as possible. Titania,
after all, leaves before that point is reached:
"Fairies, away! / We shall chide downright if I longer
stay" ( II.i.144-145). At moments of
dramatic intensity, the most violent distortion can go unnoticed; what
the poet is doing is ignored in responding to what his
people are doing. But here a great
part of the point is that we should notice the distortion, the
action of the poet, the wit. Plot tension launches
flights of witty poetry which use it up,
so to speak, just as the tensions in broad comedy are discharged
in laughter. Rhetorical schematizations,
or patterns of
[ 147 ] Moonlight and Moonshine: The Ironic Burlesque
The
consciousness of the creative or poetic act itself, which pervades the
main action, explains the subject-matter of the burlesque accompaniment
provided by the clowns. If Shakespeare were chiefly concerned
with the nature of love, the clowns would be in love,
after their fashion. But instead, they are putting on a play. That some
commoners should honor the wedding, in their own way, along with the
figures from pageantry, is of course in keeping with the purpose of
gathering into a play the several sorts of entertainments usually
presented separately. But an organic purpose is served too: the clowns
provide a broad burlesque of the mimetic impulse to become something by
acting it, the impulse which in the main action is
fulfilled by imagination and understood by humor. Bottom feels he can
be anything: "What is Pyramus, a lover, or a tyrant? . . .
An I may hide my face, let me play Thisby too . . . Let me play the
lion too." His soul would like to fly out into them all; but he is not
Puck! In dealing with dramatic illusion, he and the other mechanicals
are invincibly literal-minded, carrying to absurdity the tendency to
treat the imaginary as though it were
When the clowns think that Bottom's transformation has deprived them of their chief actor, their lament seems pointedly allusive to Shakespeare's company and their play.
Snug.
Masters, the Duke is coming from the temple,
and there is two or three lords and ladies more married. If our
sport had gone forward, we had all been made men.
The
repetition of "sixpence a day" seems loaded: if Bottom in Pyramus is
worth sixpence, what is Kempe in Bottom worth? For Bottom is to Theseus
as Kempe was to the nobleman for whom the
Quince.
. . . But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight
into a chamber; for, you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
[149 ]
The difference between art and life is also what the clowns for get in their parlous fear lest "the.ladies be afeared of the lion" and the killing. Bottom's solution is to tell the ladies in plain language that fiction is not fact:
Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not kill'd in deed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear. (III.i.18-23)
Now this expresses Bottom's vanity, too. But producers and actors, bent on showing "character," can lose the structural, ironic point if they let the lines get lost in Bottom's strutting. What the clowns forget, having "never labour'd in their minds till now," is that a killing or a lion in a play, however plausibly presented, is a mental event.22 Because, like children, they do not discriminate
22
What Shakespeare exhibits in
Bottom's dramatics by reduction to
absurdity is expressed directly in the Prologues of H.V. There
the dramatist is dealing with heroic
events which cannot be presented "in
their huge and proper life" (Pro. V, 1.
5) and so appeals to his audience
repeatedly to "eke out our
performance with your minds," . . . "minding
true things by what their mock'ries
be" (Pro. III, 1. 35 , and Pro. IV,
1. 53) . The prologues insist continually
on the mental process by which alone a
play comes to life (Pro. I, 11. 23-25 and
28):
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
In reference to the rapid shifting of his locale, Shakespeare uses an image which might describe Puck's powers to do what men can only conceive (Pro. III, 11. 1-3) :
Thus with imagin'd wing our swift scene flies,
Even in a play where, by contrast with Dream, Shakespeare is concerned to realize actual historical events he insists this realization must be by mental projection, not literal reproduction.
[ 150 ]
In the performance of Pyramus and Thisby, Shakespeare captures the naivete of folk dramatics and makes it serve his controlling purpose as a final variant of imaginative aberration. The story from Ovid, appropriate for a burlesque in an Ovidian play, is scarcely the kind of thing the simple people would have presented in life; but their method and spirit in putting it on, and the spirit in which the noble company take it, are not unlike what is suggested by Laneham's account of the bride-ale show at Kenilworth. "If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves," Theseus observes of the Athenian artisans, "they may pass for excellent men" (V.i.2 I8). The comedy of the piece centers not so much on what is acted in it as in the continual failure to translate actor into character. Shakespeare's skill is devoted to keeping both the players and their would-be play before us at the same time, so that we watch, not Pyramus alone, nor Bottom alone, but Bottom "in Pyramus," the fact of the one doing violence to the fiction of the other.
Almost half of Pyramus and Thisby is taken up with prologues of the sort one gets in the mummers' plays:
Such prologues suit Shakespeare's purpose, because they present the performer openly climbing in the window of aesthetic illusion, where he can get stuck midway:
In this same enterlude it doth befall
"The truth is so," by warranting that fiction is fact, asks for a laugh, as does the Prologue's "At the which let no man wonder," or Moon's
Myself the man i' the moon do seem to be.
The incarnation of Wall is a particularly "happy-unhappy" inspiration, because the more Wall does, the less he is a wall and the more he is Snout.
There is a great deal of incidental amusement in the parody and burlesque with which Pyramus and Thisby is loaded. It burlesques the substance of the death scene in Romeo and Juliet in a style which combines ineptitudes from Golding's translation of Ovid with locutions from the crudest doggerel drama.25
24
J. M. Manly, Specimens of Pre-Shakespearean Drama (Boston, 1897), r,
293, from The Lutterworth Christmas
Play.
Theseus. Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead.
Perhaps there is another allusion to Romeo when, after Wall's earlier exit (V.i.210), Theseus makes the mock-sententious observation: "Now is the mural down between the two neighbours." There is nothing in Ovid about a reconciliation, but there is a great deal at the end of Romeo. Parts for Thisby's mother and father and Pyramus' father are assigned by Peter Quince in first mustering his actors (I.ii.62 ). Perhaps Shakespeare planned to make tragical mirth of their laments before he thought of Wall and Moonshine. Miss M. C. Bradbrook, in Elizabethan Stage Conditions (Cambridge, 1932), p. 39, notes that when Romeo, before the balcdny scene, "ran this way and leap'd this orchard wall" to get away from his friends and into the Capulets' orchard, the staging of the wall presented an unusual problem. She adds that "it is amusing to note the parody of this same orchard wall" in Dream. Snout's "you can never bring in a wall" certainly seems a likely by-product of Shakespeare's having recent experience with the difficulty. The effect of the burlesque does not, of course, hinge on specifically recognizing Romeo as a prototype. An awareness of the connection adds point ; but the remarks about reconciliation are funny enough simply as comic versions of the kind of sentiment to be expected at the end of a tragedy.
The style of Pyramus and Thisby imitates with a shrewd eye for characteristic defects what Marlowe, in the Prologue to Tamburlaine, called the "jigging veins of rhyming mother wits." The most common devices used by inept early poets "to plump their verse withall" turn up in Shakespeare's parody. The leaden ring of the expletives "same" ("This same wall") and "certaine" ("This beauteous Lady, Thisby is certaine" ) recalls many pieces in Dodsley's Old English Plays and many passages in Golding's translation of Ovid. Golding's style may well have been Shakespeare's most immediate model. The comic possibilities of the story are very obvious indeed in the translation, whose fourteeners here are often incapable of carrying the elaborate rhetoric. One bit of this high-flown rhetoric is the apostrophizing of the wall, which appears in Golding thus (Shakespeare's Ovid / Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W.H.D. Rouse [London, 1904], pp. 83-84, Bk. rv, II. 90-1oo) :
O thou envious wall (they sayd) why letst thou lovers thus?
In addition to the top-heavy personification which in Golding makes the wall into a sort of stubborn chaperone, Shakespeare's version exploits the fatuous effect of suddenly reversing the wall's attributes from envious to courteous, when the wall, after all, is perfectly consistent. Bottom at first wheedles a "courteous Wall" and then storms at a "wicked Wall." The would-be pathetic touch about kissing the parget (plaster) instead of each others' lips also reappears (V.i.204), To fill out a line, or to make a rhyme as false as "Thisby . . . secretly," the mother wits often elaborate redundancies, so that technical ineptitude results in a most inappropriate and unpoetical factuality. Shakespeare exploits this effect repeated!y:
My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones,
There are also many redundant synonyms, like "Did scare away, or rather did affright." In imitating the use of such homemade stuffing, Shakespeare goes far back (or down) for his models, notably skipping an intermediate, more pretentious level of sophistication in bad Tudor poetry, where fustian classical allusions, "English Seneca read by Candlelight," replace bald redundancy as the characteristic means of plumping verse. Pistol's discharges are Shakespeare's burlesque of such bombast. Most of Bottom's rhetoric is a step down the ladder : the "Shafalus" and "Limander" of Pyramus are classical names as these appear in such pieces as Thersites.
Perhaps when Bottom starts up, very much alive despite his emphatic death, to correct the Duke in the matter of the wall, his comic resurrection owes some thing, directly or via the jig, to the folk play. When the St. George, or Fool, or whoever, starts up, alive again, after the miraculous cure, the reversal must have been played as a moment of comical triumph, an upset, more or less grotesque or absurd, no doubt, but still exhilarating-to come back alive is the ultimate turning of the tables on whatever is an enemy of life. The most popular of Elizabethan jigs, "The Jig of Rowland," involves a device of playing dead and pretending to come back to life which may well be a rationalized development of this primitive resurrection motif. Rowland wins back Margaret from the Sexton by getting into a grave and playing dead; she laments him and then starts to go off with his rival; but Rowland jumps up behind them, astonishes the Sexton, sends him packing and wins the wench. (Baskervill, Jig, pp. 220-222.) Such brief comic song and dance dramas as this were used as afterpieces following the regular play. Pyramus and Thisby almost amounts to a developed jig which has been brought into the framework of the play instead of being presented as an afterpiece, in the usual fashion. The dance element comes in when Bottom, after coming back alive, concludes by dancing a bergomasque.
[ 152 ]
The
best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are
no worse, if imagination amend them. Theseus expresses part of our response-- a growing detachment towards imagination, moving towards the distance from the dream expressed in Puck's epilogue.
The
meeting in the woods of Bottom and
Titania is the climax of the polyphonic interplay; it comes
in the middle of the dream, when the humor has the most
work to do. Bottom in the ass's head provides a literal metamorphosis,
and in the process brings in the element of grotesque fantasy which the
Savage Man or Woodwose furnished at Kenilworth, a comic version
of an animal-headed dancer or of the sort of figure
Shakespeare used in Herne the Hunter,
"with great ragged horns," at the
oak in The Merry Wives of Windsor. At the same time
he is the theatrical company's clown "thrust in
Titania. I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again. Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note;
Bottom. Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little com pany together now-a-days. The more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, Ican gleek, upon occasion.
Titania. Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.
Bottom. Not so, neither . . . (lll.i.140-152)
From a vantage below romance, the clown makes the same point as sceptical Theseus, that reason and love do not go together. Titania tells him that she
. . . will purge thy mortal grossness so
But even her magic cannot transpose" Bottom.
The "low" or "realistic" effect which he produces when juxtaposed with her is much less a matter of accurate imitation of common life than one assumes at first glance. Of course the homely touches are telling-forms of address like "Methinks, mistress" or words like gleek suggest a social world remote from the elegant queen's. But the realistic effect does not depend on Bottom's being like real weavers, but on the detente of imaginative tension, on a downward movement which counters imaginative lift. This anti- poetic action involves, like the poetic, a high degree of abstraction from
[ 155 ]
Bottom. I cry your worships mercy, heartily. I beseech your warship's name.
Cobwebs served the Elizabethans for adhesive plaster, so that when Bottom proposes to "make bold with" Cobweb, he treats him as a thing, undoing the personification on which the little fellow's life depends. To take hold of Cobweb in this way is of course a witty thing to do, when one thinks about it. But since the wit is in the service of a literal tendency, we can take it as the expression of a "hempen homespun.'' There is usually a similar incongruity between the "stupidity" of a clown and the imagination and wit required to express such stupidity. Bottom's charming combination of ignorant exuberance and oblivious imaginativeness make him the most humanly credible and appealing personality Shakespeare had yet created from the incongruous qualities required for the clown's role. The only trouble with the part, in practice, is that performers become so preoccupied with bringing out the weaver's vanity as an actor that they lose track of what the role is expressing as part of the larger imaginative design.
For there is an impersonal, imaginative interaction between the clowning and the rest of the play which makes the clowns mean more than they themselves know and more than they are as personalities. Bottom serves to represent, in so aware a play, the limits of awareness, limits as limitations-- and also, at moments, limits as form and so strength.
Bottom. Where are these lads? Where are these hearts?
[156]
It is ludicrous for Bottom to be so utterly unable to cope with the "wonders," especially where he is shown boggling in astonishment as he wordlessly remembers them: "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was" ( IV.i.207-209). But there is something splendid, too, in the way he exuberantly rejoins "these lads" and takes up his particular, positive life as a "true Athenian." Metamorphosis cannot faze him for long. His imperviousness, indeed, is what is most delightful about him with Titania: he remains so completely himself , even in her arms, and despite the outward change of his head and ears; his confident, self -satisfied tone is a triumph of consistency, persistence, existence
The value of humor, and the finest pleasure in it, depends on the seriousness of what it makes into fun. It is easy to be gay by taking a trivial theme, or by trivializing an important theme. The greatness of comedy, as of every other art form, must rest, to use Henry James' phrase, on the amount of "felt life" with which it deals in its proper fashion. After examining the structure and artifice of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we can now ask how much reality it masters by its mirth. This comedy is the first that is completely, triumphantly successful; but it has the limitations, as well as the strength, of a youthful play.
The role of imagination
in experience is a major preoccupation in other plays of the same
period. Dreams are several times presented as oracles of irrational
powers shaping life, and inspire dread and awe. In the death scene of
Clarence, in Richard III , the poet had presented the experience of
oppression and helplessness on waking from the grip of nightmare. A Midsummer Night's Dream
[157 ]
Demetrius. These things seem small and undistin guishable,
The
fun which Mercutio makes of dreams and fairies in
Romeo and Juliet is an attempt to do in a single speech what the
whole action does in A Midsummer Night' s Dream.
His excursion on
Queen Mab is designed to laugh away Romeo's dream-born misgivings
about their fatal visit to the Capulets.
Romeo. . . . we mean well, in going to this masque;
[158 ]
Romeo. Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Romeo's dream, however, in spite of Mercutio, is not to be dismissed so easily as airy nothing:
. . . my mind misgives
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play in the spirit of Mercutio: the dreaming in it includes the knowledge "that dreamers often lie." The comedy and tragedy are companion pieces: the one moves away from sadness as the other moves away from mirth. One can feel, indeed, that in the comedy, as compared with Shakespeare's later works, mastery comes a little too easily, because the imaginary and the real are too easy to separate. The same thing can be said of the other plays of the period, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II . Theseus makes a generalization that
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
In all these plays the young author gives dramatic urgency to poetic language by putting his heroes in situations which give the lie to what their minds imagine under the influence of passion. Tragedy is
[ 159 ]
A grave? O, no, a lanthorn,
slaught'red youth,
In the poetry of this period, there is room beside metaphor and hyperbole to insert a phrase like "so to speak." Marcus exclaims of Titus' distraction:
Alas, poor man! Grief has so wrought on him
The same remark could be made about Richard II, whose hosts of grief-begotten angels prove so inadequate against the "true substances" mobilized by Bolingbroke. The plays present passionate expression or delusion by the use of relatively simple contrasts
[ 160 ]
In Richard II , however, the simple shadow-substance antithesis becomes something more: the divine right of kings gives one sort of objective validity to Richard's imaginings-- although his guardian angels are ineffective immediately, they are grounded in moral perception, and Bolingbroke eventually finds their avenging power. Later in Shakespeare's work, the imagination becomes in its own right a way of knowing "more things in heaven and earth" than cool reason ever comprehends. Contrasts between real and imaginary are included in and superseded by contrasts between appearance and reality, as these unfold at various levels of awareness. How different Shakespeare's sense of reality finally became is evident if we set the proud scepticism of Theseus beside the humble scepticism of Prospero. The presiding genius of Shakespeare's latest fantasy also turns from a pageant-like work of imagination to reflect on its relation to lif e. But for him life itself is like the insubstantial pageant, and we, not just the Titanias and Oberons, are such stuff as dreams are made on.
The greater
profundity of the later work, however, should not blind us
to the different virtues of the earlier; The confident assumption
dominant in A Midsummer Night' s Dream, that substance and shadow can
be kept separate, determines the peculiarly unshadowed gaiety of the
fun it makes with fancy. Its organization by
polarities-- everyday-holiday, town-grove, day-night, waking -dreaming- provides a remarkable resource for mastering passionate
experience. By a curious paradox, the
full dramatization of holiday affirmations permitted "that side"
of experience to be boxed off by Theseus. If we take our stand
shoulder to shoulder with Theseus, the play can
be an agency for distinguishing what is
merely "apprehended" from what is "comprehended." Shake speare's
method of structuring is as powerful, in its way, as Descartes'
distinction between mind and body, the
formidable engine by which the philosopher
swept away "secondary qualities" so that
mathematical mind might manipulate geometrical
extension. If we do not in our age want to rest in Theseus'
rationalistic posi tion (any more than in
Descartes') , it remains a great achievement
[ 161 ]
Theseus,
moreover, does not quite have the last word, even in this play: his
position is only one stage in a dialectic. Hippolyta will not be
reasoned out of her wonder, and answers her new Lord with ;
Did
it happen, or didn't it happen? The doubt is justified by what
Shakespeare has shown us. We are not asked to think that fairies
exist. But imagination, by presenting
these figments, has reached to something, a creative
tendency and
process. What is this process? Where is it? What shall we
call it ? It is what happens in
the play. It is what
happens in marriage. To name it
requires many words,
……………………………………………………………………………. TESTING COURTESY AND HUMANITY IN TWELFTH NIGHT nature to
her bias drew in that. THE title of Twelfth Night may well have come from the first occasion when it was performed, whether or not Dr. Leslie Hotson is right in arguing that its first night was the court celebration of the last of the twelve days of Christmas on January 6, 1600-1601. 1 1 In The
First Night of "Twelfth Night" (New York, 1954), Dr. Hotson has recovered, once again, documents that are
astonishingly a propos. The most exciting is a long letter home written by a
real nobleman named Orsino, who was Elizabeth's honored guest when she
witnessed a play “in the Hall, which was richly hanged and degrees placed
round about it." Don Virginio Orsino's account
to his Duchess of the way he was honored gives a vivid picture of the Twelfth
Day occasion at court, which Mr. Hotson skillfully
supplements with other evidence, much of it also new, so as to give us the
most complete and graphic description we have of the circumstances of a
dramatic performance at a court holiday. The Duke's candid letter reports
that "there was acted a mingled comedy, with pieces of music and
dances" (una commedia mescolata,
can musicne e balli). But
then it adds "and this too I am keeping to tell by word of mouth."
What maddening bad luck! Here, and everywhere else, the clinching proof
eludes Dr. Hotson, despite his skill and
persistence. He himself cannot resist regarding it as a fact that Twelfth Night was the play in question
on January 6, 1600-1601. But a sceptic can begin by
asking where, in Twelfth Night, are those balli-- which Don Virginio
witnessed-- the play is notable, among Shakespeare's gay comedies, for its
lack of dances. One could go on to ask whether it would not be more likely
that the name Orsino would be used sometime after the great man's visit, when
the elegant ring of it would still sound in people's ears but no offense be
done. A devil's advocate could go on and on, so rich, and so conjectural, is
Dr. Hotson's book. But it makes
a real contribution, even if one is not convinced that the play on that night
must have been Twelfth Night, and
even if one rejects many of its sweeping conclusions about such matters as
staging. Dr. Hotson is a "literalist of the
historical imagination," to use Marianne Moore's phrase. He has produced
something equivalent to an "imaginary garden with real toads in it--
real circumstances and actions of Elizabethan life. He makes us aware of what
the high day at court was like. And he describes and exemplifies many
features of Twelfth Night custom in
a fresh way, and so defines for us the sort of thing that Shakespeare refers
to by his title. He also provides, from his remarkable knowledge of the
period, a wealth of useful incidental glosses to hard places in the play. But useful
as his book can be, whether literally right or not, it is very misleading in
one respect. For he writes as though the festive quality of Twelfth Night were wholly derived, on
a one-to-one sort of basis, from its being commissioned for a court revel. He
neglects the fact that, whatever its first night, the play was designed to
work, also, on the public stage, so that it had to project the spirit of
holiday into forms that would be effective every day. He also ignores the
fact that by the time Shakespeare came to write Twelfth Night, festive comedy was an established specialty with
him. 2 E. K.
Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, 3z7-3 Z8 The title tells us that
the play is like holiday misrule-- though not just like it, for it adds
"or what you will." The law student John Manningham, who saw it at
the Middle Temple's feast on February
2, 1602, wrote in his diary that it was “much like the Comedy of Errores,
or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni."
We have the now-familiar combination of festive, literary and theatrical
traditions. In addition to Plautine situation and
Italian comedy, Shakespeare drew on a prose romance (derived
indirectly from Italian comedy), Rich's Apolonius
and Silla. He used no written source for the
part Manningham specially praised: “A good practice
in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him…” 2 Shakespeare can
be inclusive in his use of traditions because his powers of selection and composition
can arrange each element so that only those facets of it show which will
serve his expressive purpose. He
leaves out the dungeon in which Rich's jealous Orsino shuts up Viola, as well
as Sebastian's departure leaving Olivia with child; but he does not hesitate
to keep such events as the shipwreck, _or Sebastian's amazing marriage to a
stranger, or Orsino's threatening Viola. It is not the credibility of the event that is decisive, but what can
be expressed through it. Thus the shipwreck is made the occasion for
Viola to exhibit an undaunted, aristocratic mastery of adversity-- she
settles what she shall do next almost as though picking out a costume for a
masquerade: I'll serve this duke, Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to
him; It may be worth thy pains. For I can
sing, And
speak to him in several sorts of music ...
(Iii· 55-58) [ 241 ] What matters is not the event, but what the language says as gesture, the aristocratic, free-and-easy way she settles what she will do and what the captain will do to help her. The pathetical complications which are often dwelt on in the romance are not allowed to develop far in the play; instead Viola's spritely language conveys the fun she is having in playing a man's part, with a hidden womanly perspective about it. One cannot quite say that she is playing in a masquerade, because disguising just for the fun of it is a different thing. But the same sort of festive pleasure in transvestism is expressed. It is amazing how little happens in Twelfth Night, how much of the time people are merely talking, especially in the first half, before the farcical complications are sprung. Shakespeare is so skillful by now in rendering attitudes by the gestures of easy conversation that when it suits him he can almost do without events. In the first two acts of Twelfth Night he holds our interest with a bare minimum of tension while unfolding a pattern of contrasting attitudes and tones in his several persons. Yet Shakespeare's whole handling of romantic story, farce, and practical joke makes a composition which moves in the manner of his earlier festive comedies, through release to clarification. Olivia's phrase in the last act, when she remembers Malvolio and his "madness," can summarize the way the play moves: A most extracting frenzy of
mine own People are caught up by delusions or misapprehensions which take them out of themselves, bringing out what they would keep hidden or did not know was there. Madness is a key word. The outright gull Malvolio is already “a rare turkey-cock” from “contemplation” (II.v.3S) before Maria goes to work on him with her forged letter. “I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me” (II.v.I79), [ 242 ] he exclaims when he has read it, having been put “in such a dream that, when the image of it leaves him, he must run mad” (IIv.2IO-2II). He is too self-absorbed actually to run mad, but when he comes at Olivia, smiling and cross-gartered, she can make nothing else of it: “Why, this is very mid-summer madness” (III.iv.6I). And so the merrymakers have the chance to put him in a dark room and do everything they can to face him out of his five wits. What they bring about as a “pastime” (III.iv.151), to “gull him into a nayword, and make him a common recreation” (IIiii145), happens unplanned to others by disguise and mistaken identity. Sir Toby, indeed, “speaks nothing but madman” (I.V.I15) without any particular occasion. “My masters, are you mad?” (II iii 93) Malvolio asks as he comes in to try to stop the midnight singing. Malvolio is sure that he speaks for the countess when he tells Toby that “though she harbors you as her kinsman, she's nothing allied to your disorders” (II.iii.I03). But in fact this sober judgment shows that he is not “any more than a steward” (IIiii.I22). For Olivia, dignified though her bearing is, suddenly finds herself doing “I know not what” (I.v.327) under the spell of Viola in her page's disguise: “how now? / Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” (Iv.313-314) “Poor lady,” exclaims Viola, “she were better love a dream!” (II.ii.2 7) In their first interview, she had told the countess, in urging the count's suit, that “what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve” (I.v.200-20I). By the end of their encounter, Olivia says the same thing in giving way to her passion: “Fate, show thy force! Ourselves we do not owe” (Iv.329) And soon her avowals of love come pouring out, overcoming the effort at control which shows she is a lady: O, what a deal of scorn looks
beautiful [243] A little later, when she hears about Malvolio and his smile she summarizes the parallel with “I am as mad as he, / If sad and merry madness equal be” (IIIiv.I5-I6). The farcical challenge and “fight” between Viola and Sir Andrew are another species of frantic action caused by delusion. “More matter for a May morning” (IIIiv.I56) Fabian calls it as they move from pretending to exorcise Malvolio's devil to pretending to act as solicitous seconds for Sir Andrew. When Antonio enters the fray in manly earnest, there is still another sort of comic error, based not on a psychological distortion but simply on mistaken identity. This Plautine sort of confusion leads Sebastian to exclaim, “Are all the people mad?” (IV.i.29) Just after we have seen “Malvolio the lunatic” (IV.ii.26) baffled in the dark room (“But tell me true, are you not mad indeed? or do you but counterfeit?” IV.ii.I2I-I23), we see Sebastian struggling to understand his wonderful encounter with Olivia: This is the air; that is the glorious sun; The open-air clarity of this little scene anticipates the approaching moment when delusions and misapprehensions are resolved by the finding of objects appropriate to passions. Shakespeare, with fine stagecraft, spins the misapprehensions out to the last moment. He puts Orsino, in his turn, through an extracting frenzy, the Duke's frustration converting at last to violent impulses toward Olivia and Cesario, before he discovers in the page the woman's love he could not win from the countess. That it should all depend on there being an indistinguishable twin brother always troubles me when I think about it, though never when I watch the play. Can it be that we enjoy the play so much simply because it is a wish-fulfillment presented so skillfully that we do not notice that our hearts are duping our heads? Certainly part of our pleasure comes from pleasing make-believe. But I think that what chance determines about particular destinies is justified, as was the case with The Merchant of Venice, by the play’s realizing dynamically general distinctions and tendencies in life. [ 244 ] The most fundamental distinction the play brings home to us is the difference between men and women. To say this may seem to labor the obvious; for what love story does not emphasize this difference? But the disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is exploited so as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference. Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so, a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. One can add that with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign. This basic security explains why there is so little that is queazy in all Shakespeare's handling of boy actors playing women, and playing women pretending to be men. This is particularly remarkable in Twelfth Night, for Olivia's infatuation with Cesario-Viola is another, more fully developed case of the sort of crush Phebe had on Rosalind. Viola is described as distinctly feminine in her disguise, more so than Rosalind: ... they
shall yet belie thy happy years When on her embassy Viola asks to see Olivia's face and exclaims about it, she shows a woman's way of relishing another woman's beauty-and sensing another's vanity: “ ‘Tis beauty truly blent ....” “I see you what you are-- you are too proud” (II.257, 269). Olivia’s infatuation with feminine qualities in a youth takes her, doing “I know not what,” from one stage of life out into another, from shutting out suitors in mourning for her brother's memory, to ardor for a man, Sebastian, and the clear certainty that calls out to “husband” in the confusion of the last scene. We might wonder whether this spoiled and dominating young heiress may not have been attracted by what she could hope to dominate in Cesario's youth-- but it was not the habit of Shakespeare's age to look for such implications. And besides, Sebastian is not likely to be dominated; we have seen him respond to Andrew when the ninny knight thought he was securely striking Cesario: [ 245 ] Andrew. Now, sir, have I met
you again? There's for you! To see this manly reflex is delightful-- almost a relief-- for we have been watching poor Viola absurdly perplexed behind her disguise as Sir Toby urges her to play the man: “Dismount thy tuck, be yare in thy preparation. . . . Therefor on, or strip your sword naked; for meddle you must, that's certain” (IIIiv.244-24S, 274¬276). She is driven to the point where she exclaims in an aside: “Pray God defend me! A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man” (IIIiv.331-333). What she lacks, Sebastian has. His entrance in the final scene is preceded by comical testimony of his prowess, Sir Andrew with a broken head and Sir Toby halting. The particular implausibility that there should be an identical man to take Viola's place with Olivia is submerged in the general, beneficent realization that there is such a thing as a man. Sebastian's comment when the confusion of identities is resolved points to the general force which has shaped particular developments: So comes it, lady, you have
been mistook. Over against the Olivia-Cesario relation, there are Orsino-Cesario and Antonio-Sebastian. Antonio's impassioned friendship for Sebastian is one of those ardent attachments between young people of the same sex which Shakespeare frequently presents, with his positive emphasis, as exhibiting the loving and lovable qualities later expressed in love for the other sex.4 Orsino's fascination with Cesario is more complex. In the opening scene, his restless sensibility can find no object: "naught enters there, ... / But falls into abatement ... / Even in a minute" (Ii.II-14). [ 246 ] Olivia might be an adequate object; she at least is the Diana the sight of whom has, he thinks, turned him to an Acteon torn by the hounds of desires. When we next see him, and Cesario has been only three days in his court, his entering question is "Who saw Cesario, ho?" (Iiv. 10) and already he has unclasped to the youth "the book even of [his] secret soul" (Iiv.I4). He has found an object. The delight he takes in Cesario's fresh youth and graceful responsiveness in conversation and in service, is one part of the spectrum of love for a woman, or better, it is a range of feeling that is common to love for a youth and love for a woman. For the audience, the woman who is present there, behind Cesario's disguise, is brought to mind repeatedly by the talk of love and of the differences of men and women in love. "My father had a daughter loved a man ..." (IIiv.II0)
She never told
her love, This supremely feminine damsel, who "sat like patience on a monument," is not Viola. She is a sort of polarity within Viola, realized all the more fully because the other, active side of Viola does not pine in thought at all, but instead changes the subject: “… and yet I know not. / Sir, shall we to this lady? -Ay, that's the theme" (ILiv.I24-12S). The effect of moving back and forth from woman to sprightly page is to convey how much the sexes differ yet how much they have in common, how everyone who is fully alive has qualities of both. Some such general recognition is obliquely suggested in Sebastian's amused summary of what happened to Olivia: You would have been contracted
to a maid; The countess marries the man in this composite, and the count marries the maid. He too has done he knows not what while nature drew him to her bias, for he has fallen in love with the maid without knowing it. [ 247 ] We have seen how each of the festive comedies tends to focus on a particular kind of folly that is released along with love-witty masquerade in Love's Labour's Lost, delusive fantasy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, romance in As You Like It, and, in The Merchant of Venice, prodigality balanced against usury. Twelfth Night deals with the sort of folly which the title points to, the folly of misrule. But the holiday reference limits its subject too narrowly: the play exhibits the liberties which gentlemen take with decorum in the pursuit of pleasure and love, including the liberty of holiday, but not only that. Such liberty is balanced against time-serving. As Bassanio's folly of prodigality leads in the end to gracious fulfillment, so does Viola's folly of disguise. There is just a suggestion of the risks when she exclaims, not very solemnly, Disguise, I see thou art a
wickedness As in The Merchant of Venice the story of a prodigal is the occasion for an exploration of the use and abuse of wealth, so here we get an exhibition of the use and abuse of social liberty. What enables Viola to bring off her role in disguise is her perfect courtesy, in the large, humanistic meaning of that term as the Renaissance used it, the corteziania of Castiglione. Her mastery of courtesy goes with her being the daughter of “that Sebastian of Messalina whom I know you have heard of”: gentility shows through her disguise as does the fact that she is a woman. The impact on Olivia of Cesario's quality as a gentleman is what is emphasized as the countess, recalling their conversation, discovers that she is falling in love: 'What is thy parentage?' 'Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.
I'll
be sworn thou art. [ 248 ] We think of manners as a mere prerequisite of living decently, like cleanliness. For the Renaissance, they could be almost the end of life, as the literature of courtesy testifies. Twelfth Night carries further an interest in the fashioning of a courtier which, as Miss Bradbrook points out, appears in several of the early comedies, especially The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and which in different keys Shakespeare was pursuing, about the same time as he wrote Twelfth Night, in Hamlet and Measure for Measure. People in Twelfth Night talk of courtesy and manners constantly. But the most important expression of courtesy of course is in object lessons. It is their lack of breeding and manners which makes the comic butts ridiculous, along with their lack of the basic, free humanity which, be it virile or feminine, is at the center of courtesy and flowers through it. Mr. Van Doren, in a fine essay, observes that Twelfth Night has a structure like The Merchant of Venice. "Once again Shakespeare has built a world out of music and melancholy, and once again this world is threatened by an alien voice. The opposition of Malvolio to Orsino and his class parallels the opposition of Shylock to Antonio and his friends. The parallel is not precise, and the contrast is more subtly contrived; Shakespeare holds the balance in a more delicate hand ...."6 One way in which this more delicate balance appears is that the contest of revellers with intruder does not lead to neglecting ironies about those who are on the side of pleasure. We are all against Malvolio, certainly, in the great moment when the whole opposition comes into focus with Toby's "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" (II.iii.123-12S) The festive spirit shows up the kill-joy vanity of Malvolio's decorum. The steward shows his limits when he calls misrule "this uncivil rule." But one of the revellers is Sir Andrew, who reminds us that there is no necessary salvation in being a fellow who delights "in masques and revels sometimes altogether" (I.iii. I 2I). There was no such ninny pleasure-seeker in The Merchant of Venice; his role continues Shallow's, the would-be-reveller who is comically inadequate. To put such a leg as his into "a flame- I) Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, Ch. IX. 6 Shakespeare, p. 161. [249] coloured stock" only shows how meager it is. This thin creature's motive is self-improvement: he is a version of the stock type of prodigal who is gulled in trying to learn how to be gallant. As in Restoration comedy the fop confirms the values of the rake, Aguecheek serves as foil to Sir Toby. But he also marks one limit as to what revelry can do for a man: "I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing and bear-baiting" (Liii.97-99). Sir Toby is gentlemanly liberty incarnate, a specialist in it. He lives at his ease, enjoying heritage, the something-for-nothing which this play celebrates, as The Merchant of Venice celebrates wealth-- what he has without having to deserve it is his kinsman's place in Olivia's household: Maria. What a caterwauling do you keep here! If my lady have not call'd up her steward Malvolio and bid him turn you out of doors, never trust me. Sir Toby. My lady's a Catayan, we are politicians, Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsay, and [sings] "Three merry men be we." Am I not consanguineous? Am I not of her blood? Tilly-vally, lady. (II.iii.76-83) Sir Toby has by consanguinity what Falstaff has to presume on and keep by his wits: "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn but I shall have my pocket pick'd?" (I H.IV IILiii.92-94) So Sir Toby is witty without being as alert as Sir John; he does not need to be: Olivia. Cousin, cousin, how have you come so early by this lethargy? Toby. Lechery? I defy lechery. There's one at the gate. Olivia. Ay, marry, what is he? Toby. Let him be the devil an he will. I care not! Stage drunkenness, here expressed by wit that lurches catch-as-catch-can, conveys the security of "good life" in such households as Olivia's, the old-fashioned sort that had not given up "house-keeping." Because Toby has "faith"-- the faith that goes with belonging-- he does not need to worry when Maria teases him about confining himself "within the modest limits of order." "Confine?” in his clothes, he has the ease of a gentleman whose place in the world is secure, so that, while he can find words like consanguineous at will, he can also say "Sneck up!" to Malvolio's accusation that he shows "no respect of persons, places nor time" (II.iii.99). Sir Toby is the sort of kinsman who would take the lead at such Christmas feasts as Sir Edward Dymoke patronized in Lincolnshire -- a Talboys Dymoke.1 His talk is salted with holiday morals: "I am sure care's an enemy of life" (I.iii.2-3). "Not to be abed before midnight is to be up betimes" (II.iii. I -2). He is like Falstaff in maintaining saturnalian paradox and in playing impromptu the role of lord of misrule. But in his whole relation to the world he is fundamentally different from Prince Hal's great buffoon. Falstaff makes a career of misrule; Sir 1 The whole
encounter between Talboys Dymoke's
revellers and the Earl of Lincoln is remarkably like that
between Sir Toby's group and Malvolio. See above, The parallels are all the more
impressive because no influence relationship is involved; there must have
been many such encounters. Toby uses misrule to show up a careerist. There is little direct invocation by poetry of the values of heritage and housekeeping, such as we get of the beneficence of wealth in The Merchant of Venice. But the graciousness of community is conveyed indirectly by the value put on music and song, as Mr. Van Doren observes. The Duke's famous opening lines start the play with music. His hypersensitive aestheticism savors strains that have a dying fall and mixes the senses in appreciation: "like the sweet sound / That breathes upon a bank of violets" (Ii.5-6). Toby and his friends are more at ease about "0 mistress mine," but equally devoted to music in their way. (Toby makes fun of such strained appreciation as the Duke's when he concludes their praises of the clown's voice with "To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion" (II.iii67-68.) Back at court, in the next scene, the significance of music in relation to community is suggested in the Duke's lines about the "old and antique song": Mark it, Cesario; it is old and
plain. The wonderful line about the free maids, which throws such firm stress on "free' by the delayed accent, and then slows up in strong, regular monosyllables, crystallizes the play's central feeling for freedom in heritage and community. It is consciously nostalgic; the old age is seen from the vantage of "these most brisk and giddy-paced times" (Il.iv.6). Throughout the play a contrast is maintained between the taut, restless, elegant court, where people speak a nervous verse, and the free-wheeling household of Olivia, where, except for the intense moments in Olivia's amorous interviews with Cesario, people live in an easy-going prose. The contrast is another version of pastoral. The household is more than anyone person in it. People keep interrupting each other, changing their minds, letting their talk run out into foolishness-- and through it all Shakespeare expresses the day-by-day going on of a shared life: Maria. Nay, either tell me where thou hast been, or I will not open my lips so wide as a bristle may enter in way of thy excuse. (l.v.I-3) Fabian. . .. You know he brought me out o’favour with my lady about a bear-baiting here. Toby. To anger him we'll have the bear again ... (Il.v.8-1 I) Fabian. Why, we shall make him mad indeed. Maria. The house will be the quieter. (IIl.iv.I46-147 ) Maria's character is a function of the life of "the house"; she moves within it with perfectly selfless tact. "She's a beagle true-bred," says Sir Toby: her part in the housekeeping and its pleasures is a homely but valued kind of "courtiership." All of the merrymakers show a fine sense of the relations of people, including robust Fabian, and Sir Toby, when he has need. The fool, especially, has this courtly awareness. We see in the first scene that he has to have it to live: he goes far enough in the direction of plain speaking to engage Olivia's unwilling attention, then brings off his thesis that she is the fool so neatly that he is forgiven. [ 252 ] What Viola praises in the fool's function is just what we should expect in a play about courtesy and liberty: This fellow is wise enough to
play the fool, It is remarkable how little Feste says that is counterstatement in Touchstone's manner: there is no need for ironic counterstatement, because here the ironies are embodied in the comic butts. Instead what Feste chiefly does is sing and beg-- courtly occupations-- and radiate in his songs and banter a feeling of liberty based on accepting disillusion. "What's to come is still unsure ... Youth's a stuff will not endure" (II.iii.50, 53). In The Merchant of Venice, it was the gentlefolk who commented "How every fool can play upon the word!" but now it is the fool himself who says, with mock solemnity: "To see this age/ A sentence is but a chev'ril glove to a good witl" (IIl.i.I2-13). He rarely makes the expected move, but conveys by his style how well he knows what moves are expected: so
that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make Duke. Why, this is excellent. Feste. By my troth, sir, no; though it pleases you to be one of my friends. (,V.i.24-29 ) His feeling for people and their relations comes out most fully when he plays "Sir Topas the curate, who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic" (IV.ii.2S-26). This is the pastime of "dissembling" in a minister's gown that led to so much trouble for Sir Edward Dymoke's bailiff, John Craddock the elder. Viola, who as "nuntio" moves from tense court to relaxed household, has much in common with Feste in the way she talks, or better, uses talk; but she also commands effortlessly, when there is occasion, Shakespeare's mature poetic power: [ 253 ] It gives a very echo to the seat "Thou dost speak masterly," the Duke exclaims-- as we must too. Part of her mastery is that she lets herself go only rarely, choosing occasions that are worthy. Most of the time she keeps her language reined in, often mocking it as she uses it, in Feste's fashion. Perhaps it is because he finds himself beaten at his own game that he turns on her ungraciously, as on no one else: Viola. I warrant thou art a merry fellow and car'st for nothing. Clown. Not so, sir; I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible. (III.1.32-35 Once when she is mocking the elaborate language of compliment, greeting Olivia with "the heavens rain odors on you," Sir Andrew overhears and is much impressed: "That youth's a rare courtier. 'Rain odors'-well" (1II.i.97-98). He plans to get her fancy words by heart. Of course, as a rare courtier, she precisely does not commit herself to such high-flown, Osric-style expressions. Her constant shifting of tone in response to the situation goes with her manipulation of her role in disguise, so that instead of simply listening to her speak, we watch her conduct her speech, and through it feel her secure sense of proportion and her easy, alert consciousness: "To one of your receiving," says Olivia, "enough is shown" (1II.i.I3I-I32). Olivia says that "it was never merry world / Since lowly feigning was called compliment" (1II.i.I09-II0). As Sir Toby is the spokesman and guardian of that merry world, Malvolio is its antagonist. He shows his relation to festivity at once by the way he responds to Feste, and Olivia points the moral: he is "sick of self-love" and tastes "with a distempered appetite." He is not "generous, guiltless, and of free disposition." Of course, nothing is more helpful, to get revelry to boil up, than somebody trying to keep the lid on-- whatever his personal qualities. But the "stubborn and uncourteous parts" in Malvolio's character, to which Fabian refers in justifying the "device," are precisely those qualities [ 254 ] which liberty shows up. Malvolio wants "to confine himself finer than he is," to paraphrase Toby in reverse: he practices behavior to his own shadow. His language is full of pompous polysyllables, of elaborate syntax deploying synonyms: Do ye make an alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you? (1I.iii.96-99 ) In "loving" his mistress, as Cesario her master, he is a kind of foil, bringing out her genuine, free impulse by the contrast he furnishes. He does not desire Olivia's person; that desire, even in a steward, would be sympathetically regarded, though not of course encouraged, by a Twelfth-Night mood. What he wants is "to be count Malvolio," with "a demure travel of regard-telling them I know my place, as I would they should do theirs" (1I.v.59-6I). His secret wish is to violate decorum himself, then relish to the full its power over others. No wonder he has not a free disposition when he has such imaginations to keep under! When the sport betrays him into a revelation of them, part of the vengeance taken is to make him try to be festive, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, and smiling "his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies" (1II.ii.9 1-93). Maria's letter tells him to go brave, be gallant, take liberties! And when we see him "acting this in an obedient hope," (as he puts it later) he is anything but free: "This does make some obstruction of the blood, this cross-gartering . . ." (II v.21-23 ). In his "impossible passages of grossness," he is the profane intruder trying to steal part of the initiates' feast by disguising himself as one of them-- only to be caught and tormented for his profanation. As with Shylock, there is potential pathos in his bafflement, especially when Shakespeare uses to the limit the conjuring of devils out of a sane man, a device which he had employed hilariously in The Comedy of Errors. There is no way to settle just how much of Malvolio's pathos should be allowed to come through when he is down and out in the dark hole. Most people now agree that Charles Lamb's sympathy for the steward's enterprise and [ 255 ] commiseration for his sorrows is a romantic and bourgeois distortion. But he is certainly pathetic, if one thinks about it, because he is so utterly cut off from everyone else by his anxious self-love. He lacks the freedom which makes Viola so perceptive, and is correspondingly oblivious: Olivia. What kind o' man is he? Malvolio. Why, of mankind. (Iv.I 59-1 60) He is too busy carrying out his mistress' instructions about privacy to notice that she is bored with it, as later he is too busy doing her errand with the ring to notice that it is a love-token. He is imprisoned in his own virtues, so that there is sense as well as nonsense in the fool's "I say there is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog" (IV.ii.46-49). The dark house is, without any straining, a symbol: when Malvolio protests about Pythagoras, "I think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion," the clown's response is "Remain thou still in darkness." The pack of them are wanton and unreasonable in tormenting him; but his reasonableness will never let him out into "the air; ... the glorious sun" (IV.iii.I) which they enjoy together. To play the dark-house scene for pathos, instead of making fun out of the pathos, or at any rate out of most of the pathos, is to ignore the dry comic light which shows up Malvolio's virtuousness as a self-limiting automatism. Malvolio has been called a satirical portrait of the Puritan spirit, and there is some truth in the notion. But he is not hostile to holiday because he is a Puritan; he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday. Shakespeare even mocks, in passing, the thoughtless, fashionable antipathy to Puritans current among gallants. Sir Andrew responds to Maria's "sometimes he is a kind of Puritan," with "if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog" (IIiii.I5I-I53). "The devil a Puritan he is, or anything constantly," Maria observes candidly, "but a time-pleaser" (ILiii.I59-I60). Shakespeare's two greatest comic butts, Malvolio and Shy lock, express basic human attitudes which were at work in the commercial revolution, the new values whose development R. H. Tawney described in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. But both figures are conceived at a level of esthetic abstraction which makes it [ 256 ] inappropriate to identify them with specific social groups in the mingled actualities of history: Shylock, embodying ruthless money power, is no more to be equated with actual bankers than Malvolio, who has something of the Puritan ethic, is to be thought of as a portrait of actual Puritans. Yet, seen in the perspective of literary and social history, there is a curious appropriateness in Malvolio's presence, as a kind of foreign body to be expelled by laughter, in Shakespeare's last free-and-easy festive comedy. He is a man of business, and, it is passingly suggested, a hard one; he is or would like to be a rising man, and to rise he uses sobriety and morality. One could moralize the spectacle by observing that, in the long run, in the 1640'S, Malvolio was revenged on the whole pack of them. But Shakespeare's comedy remains, long after 1640, to move audiences through release to clarification, making distinctions between false care and true freedom and realizing anew, for successive generations, powers in human nature and society which make good the risks of courtesy and liberty. And this without blinking the fact that "the rain it raineth every day." Twelfth Night is usually placed just before Hamlet and the problem plays to make neat groupings according to mood, but it may well have been written after some of these works. In thinking about its relation to the other work of the period from 1600 to 1602 or 1603, it is important to recognize the independent artistic logic by which each play has its own unity. There are features of Twelfth Night that connect it with all the productions of this period. There is the side of Orsino's sensibility, for example, which suggests Troilus' hypersensitivity:
Enough, no more!
How will she love when the rich
golden shaft [ 257 ] Troilus carries this sort of verse and feeling farther:
What will it be
Troilus' lines are a much more physical and more anxious
development of the exquisite, uncentered sort of
amorousness expressed by Orsino. But
in Twelfth Night there is no
occasion to explore the harsh anti-climax to which such intensity is
vulnerable, for instead of meeting a trivial Cressida in the midst of war and
lechery, Orsino meets poised Viola in a world of
revelry. The comparison with Troilus
and Cressida makes one notice how little direct sexual reference there is
in Twelfth Night-- much less than
in most of the festive comedies. It may be that free-hearted mirth, at this
stage of Shakespeare's development, required more shamefastness
than it had earlier, because to dwell on the physical was to encounter the
"monstruosity in love" which troubled
Troilus: "that the desire is boundless and the act a
slave to limit" (Troi. III.ii.89-90). It is quite possible that Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well did not seem
to Shakespeare and his audiences so different from Twelfth Night as they seem to us. Both
of them use comic butts not unlike Andrew and Malvolio, Lucio
and Parolles are, each his way, pretenders to
community who are shown up ludicrously by their own compulsions, and so
expelled. Our difficulty with these plays, what makes them problem plays,
is that they do not feel festive; they are not merry in a deep enough way.
Part of our response may well be the result of changes in standards and
sentiments about sexual behavior, and of alterations in theatrical
convention. But the fact remains that in
both plays, release often leads, not simply to [ 258 ] folly, but to the vicious or contemptible; and the manipulations of happy accidents which make all well in the end are not made acceptable by the achievement of distinctions about values or by a convincing expression of general beneficent forces in life. Shakespeare's imagination tends to dwell on situations and motives where the energies of life lead to degradation or destruction:
Our natures do pursue There's not a soldier of us all that, in the thanksgiving before meat, do relish the petition well that prays for peace. (Meas. 1.ii.14-17) Pompey, you are partly a bawd, Pompey, howsoever you colour it in being a tapster, are you not? ... Pompey. Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live. (Meas. II.i.230-235) This sort of paradox is not brought home to us in Twelfth Night. In the problem comedies, vicious or perverse release leads to developments of absorbing interest, if not always to a satisfying movement of feeling in relation to awareness. But that is beyond our compass here. We can notice here that the fool in Twelfth Night has been over the garden wall into some such world as the Vienna of Measure for Measure. He never tells where he has been, gives no details. But he has an air of knowing more of life than anyone else-- too much, in fact; and he makes general observations like Anything that's mended is but patch'd; virtue that transgresses is but patch'd with sin, and sin that amends is but patch'd with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy? (1.V.52-56) His part does not darken the
bright colors of the play; but it gives them a dark outline, suggesting that
the whole bright revel emerges from shadow. In the
wonderful final song which he is left alone on stage to sing, the mind turns
to contemplate the limitations of revelry By
swaggering could I never thrive ...." The morning after, the weather when the sky changes, come into the
song: With tosspots still had drunken heads For the rain it raineth every day.
(V.i·4I 2-41 3) [ 259 ] It goes outside the garden gate: But when I come to man's
estate, Yet the poise of mirth, achieved by accepting disillusion, although it is now precarious, is not lost: A great while ago the world
begun, There is a certain calculated let-down in coming back to the play in this fashion; but it is the play which is keeping out the wind and the rain. The festive comic form which
Shakespeare had worked out was a way of selecting and organizing experience
which had its own logic, its own autonomy: there is no necessary reason to
think that he did not play on that instrument in Twelfth Night after making even such different music as Hamlet. Indeed, across the difference in forms, the comedy has much in common with
the tragedy: interest in courtesy and free-hearted manners; consciousness of
language and play with it as though a sentence were
but a chev'ril glove; the use of nonsequitur and nonsense. Malvolio absurdly dreams of
such a usurpation of heritage, "having come from a day bed, where I have
left Olivia sleeping," as Claudius actually accomplishes. The tragedy
moves into regions where the distinction between madness and (260) sanity begins to break down, to be recovered only through violence; the fooling with madness in the comedy is an enjoyment of the control which knows what is mad and what is not. The relation between the two plays, though not so close, is not unlike that which we have noticed between Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. But there is a great deal in Hamlet which the festive comic form cannot handle. The form can only deal with follies where nature to her bias draws; the unnatural can appear only in outsiders, intruders who are mocked and expelled. But in Hamlet, it is insiders who are unnatural. There is a great deal of wonderful fooling in the tragedy: Hamlet's playing the all-licensed fool in Claudius' court and making tormented fun out of his shocking realization of the horror of life. For sheer power of wit and reach of comic vision, there are moments in Hamlet beyond anything in the comedies we have considered. But to control the expression of the motives he is presenting, Shakespeare requires a different movement, within which comic release is only one phase. After Twelfth Night, comedy is always used in this subordinate way: saturnalian moments, comic counterstatements, continue to be important resources of his art, but their meanings are determined by their place in a larger movement. So it is with the heroic revels in Antony and Cleopatra, or with the renewal of life, after tragedy, at the festival in The Winter's Tale. [ 261 ] |
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