English
Literature: Shakespeare in Performance
Tutor:
Vicente Fores
Much Ado About Nothing, As you Like It, Twelfth
Night
Three comedies, three women,
and three
kinds of love?
Erika Schwartz
Avda. Blasco Ibañez
119, Pta 48B, Piso 12
46022
Matrícula: 6361 7101
3469 0431
E-mail:
ecatsch@alumni.uv.es
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Much
3. As
You Like It:
an absurd love? 7
4. Twelfth
Night: a
melancholic love? 9
5. Conclusion 12
6. Bibliography 13
1. Introduction
If we wish to define the particular kind
of excellence that reaches definitive form in Much Ado About Nothing, As
You Like It, and Twelfth Night,
and then passes away, then we have to speak of these plays as comedies of love.
The common element in the different achievements is the power to realize love
as a force making for proper happiness and reconciliation over a wide area of
human experience, and as a spectrum which shows sanity and eccentricity in
their social setting. In these comedies, we share a sense of the absurdity of
love with characters who know their own absurdity, and whose success we desire.
The ideal of social balance and reconciliation (which all comedies share) is
realized here in the power to live with one’s own absurdity, with ease and
confidence. That is why, in this paper I will show through the main women in
these plays, show love.
2. Much Ado About Nothing : a witty love?
Much Ado About
Nothing is a
play which is commonly remembered as a comedy of wit, focussed on Beatrice and
Benedick. It is rather remarkable that this should be so, for these persons are
not essential to the plot, and seem originally to have been designed as foils
to the inherited characters of Hero and Claudio. From the very beginning, the
poetic tone of the play is balanced between courtly ‘compliment’ -graceful
social manners and their verbal equivalents- and the war-in-words which
expresses basic, and more or less rugged, individualism; each shows up the
other, but it is the latter that makes the more immediate appeal, and that we
choose today to call ‘realism’. Hunter (1962: 16) says that we do respond to
the evocation of high-strained chivalry as we find it in the opening lines:
Leonato: …I
find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called
Claudio.
Messenger:
Much deserv’d on his part, and equally rememb’red by Don Pedro. He hath borne
himself beyond the promise of his age, doing, in the figure of a lamb, the
feats of a lion; he hath, indeed, better bett’red expectation than you must
expect of me to tell you how.
Mess: I have
already delivered him letters, and there appears much joy in him; even so much that
joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness.
Mess: In great measure.
But these noble and generous sentiments
about loving, gifted and valiant people could easily cloy, were it not for a
dash of bitterness in the line following, which stimulates our appetite:
Beatrice: I
pray you, is Signior Mountanto return’d from the wars or no?
and from
this point we carried forward naturally on a counter-current of scorn and
scoffing:
Mess: He hath done good service, lady, in this wars.
Beat: You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it;
he is a very
valiant
trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach.
Mess: And a good soldier too, lady.
Beat: And a good soldier to a lady; but what is he to a
lord?
Mess: A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuff’d with all
honourable virtues.
Beat: It is
so, indeed; he is no less than a stuff’d man; but for the stuffing-well, we are
all mortal. (1.1. 40-50)
The mocking of Beatrice could, of
course, easily become tedious, no less than the honeyed compliment of her uncle
Leonato; a play which so nicely balances the sweetness of romance against the
bitterness of wit, makes it difficult for critics to avoid taking sides and
judging one group by the standards of the other; and the assertiveness of
Beatrice’s wit is most often played down in the interest of a romantic vein of
love which Claudio and Hero are thought unfit to represent. But the nearness of
Beatrice to a shrew must be faced and admitted if we are to preserve the
balance of the play. Admitting the quality of aggression in her nature is not
quite the same thing as condemning her; and a comparison with The Taming of the Shrew will show how
thoroughly Shakespeare has, on this occasion, integrated the effective violence
of mind into a coherent vision of good life, without weakening its force. (cf.
Mares 1988: 34)
Katherine the shrew belongs to the same
family as the gentle ‘Bianca’, but there is little common ground between the
romantic sister of Comedy and the
shrewish sister, whose natural milieu is
Farce. In Much Ado, on the other
hand, there is no difficulty about fitting Beatrice into the ‘gentle’ household
of Leonato. She is a ‘lady’; she does not indulge in fisticuffs; and her
aggressiveness of temperament can be allowed, accepted and admired as ‘high
spirits’, as a self-sufficient joy: (cf. Hunter 1962: 18)
she is never
sad but when she sleeps; and not even sad then; for …she hath often dream’d of
unhappiness, and wak’d herself with laughing.
(2.1. 310-13)
Beatrice is admirable, moreover, as an
independent person, whose high spirits express an individual control over her
own happiness. It is not for her, in following the downward path described by
Hunter (1962: 19) as ‘by degrees dwindl[ing] into a wife’, to have the
independence knocked out of her by masculine violence, however jovial.
Katherine is starved into submission by the routine of a hawk-trainer:
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorg’d,
For then she never looks upon her lure…
She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not (Shrew, 4.1. 174-82)
Beatrice does not need a hawk-tamer
husband; she can act as her own trainer:
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand;
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy hand. (3.1.111-14)
Her admirable independence of mind
requires her to be able to correct herself, free of any pressure but that of
her own understanding.
The balance that Beatrice brings to the
somewhat over-honeyed world of Messina’s maidens and old men –the world with
which the plays begins- is soon reinforced in the major action by the entry of
the warrior-noblemen, Don Pedro, Don John, Benedick and Claudio. For their
arrival, like that of a rout of maskers, submerges the certainties of
The romantic love of Claudio and Hero,
for all its battery of ‘words, vows, gifts, tears’ collapses at the breath of
scandal; the play provides no obviously superior alternative to the cautious,
begrudged and finally betrayed emotions of Beatrice and Benedick; for marriage is
a social act and requires a fitness to the society to which the lovers belong.
Moreover their emotions are responsibly accepted and self-supported to this extent
that they know the limitations on all relationships of their world and they are
too well integrated into society to dream of escaping into a merely private
relationship.
The self-sufficiency and responsibility
of these two lovers in their choice of one another are further emphasized by
making their relationship, in hate or in love, seem not only equal but also
inevitable. Social pressure does not create the relationship; it only alters
its mode of expression. From Leonato’s point of view, it is true:
By my troth,
niece, thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.
But love need not be restricted to the
modes understood by Leonato, and the violent repudiation of one another that
Beatrice and Benedick indulge in clearly involves an attraction, even an
inverted kind of courtship ‘which hurts and is desired’. Each of them
self-consciously sets up a wit and therefore is bound to seek out the other as
the rival claimant. The fascination of rivalry draws Beatrice and Benedick together
even when their ostensible purpose is to hurt one another; and we in the
audience share their enjoyment, fear and thrill in the game, taking their sharp
words weapons of display rather than of self-expression. Shakespeare uses the
flexible relationship of the person speaking to the thing spoken, which is an
essential feature of wit, to limit our sense of these characters’ irrevocable
psychological involvement in the attitudes they deploy. Comic exaggeration of
one’s own standpoint is an obvious way of doing this. In the scene 2.1. 25-55
we see how Beatrice sets up the image of herself as anti-man. (cf. Hunter 1962:
19)
Beatrice and Benedick remind us that
beneath the fragile wit of their courtlings, forever turning expectation inside
out ‘like a cheveril glove’, there is a world of untroubled (though
unsupported) certitudes about justice, communication and dignity, which is no
less true for being richly comic. The play shows us the growth of individual
self-awareness out of these comic pities as indeed depending on the witty
knowledge provided from them.
3. As You Like It: an absurd love?
Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, As You Like It is the most completely
centered on the vision of the happiness that is available in this world through
personally satisfying, humanely poised and socially accepted love. This does
not mean that the play contains no evil or foolish characters (Frederick,
Oliver).
In its most generalized form this
capacity for love, seen to be connected with both self-knowledge and the
willing acceptance of hardship, is exemplified by the court of the Duke in
exile (2.1. 8-25). However, in presenting the sanity and self-awareness of
noble love, the Duke and his court form only a background. In Rosalind, and
around her is found the central image of the love which can effortlessly see
through and put aside folly, and yet retain its own exuberant vision of
happiness. Hunter (1962: 29) affirms that the more than cousinly love of
Rosalind and Celia easily defeats the less than brotherly relationship between
their respective fathers (the two Dukes).
(1.3. 86-95)
Even the flight from the court is
presented as if it was of choice and not of necessity, as if two loving cousins
were in command of the situation:
Now go we in
content
To liberty and
not to banishment. (1.3. 133-4)
The dangers
of the venture are evoked:
Alas, what
danger will it be to us,
Maids as we
are, to travel forth so far! (1.3.104-5)
But they are evoked only to be dismissed
by common sense and a knowledge of the world:
We’ll have a
swashing and a marital outside,
As many
other mannish cowards have
That do
outface it with their semblances. (1.3.116-18)
The disguise of the heroine as a boy
could lead to all kinds of amusing and embarrassing situations, but Rosalind is
never cornered in her disguise –these passages are reserved for Viola in Twelfth Night.
Hunter (1962: 31) explains that the easy
assurance of love and the bubbling vision of happiness that it offers are seen
as the basis of Rosalind’s unassertive but terrifying accurate perception of facades
and follies. As we have suggested, the
Moreover, Rosalind takes up the
challenge and issues for herself:
Ros: [Aside
to Celia] I will speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play
the knave with him. (3.2. 278-80)
Her wit succeeds where Jaque’s had
failed; it is quicker than
4. Twelfth Night: a melancholic love?
A reading of As You Like It together with Twelfth
Night will soon reveal that both plays are by the same hand. Both centre on
the vision of happiness through love, as it is seen by a high-born heroine who
is condemned to serve out her love in a strange country, disguised as a boy. Hunter
(1962: 39) affirms that both plays set the loving self-awareness of this
heroine against a gallery of poseurs, lamed by self-love (and the consequent
lack of self-awareness) and show her depth of sanity in her capacity to play
the strange role that the harsh world sets her, with efficiency but without
loosing faith in the true identity to which fate and her own efforts will
eventually return her. Both plays contain important ‘wise fool’ roles, in which
the fool (Touchstone or Feste) is largely detached from the loving and
self-loving world, knowing better than most the inevitability of
self-deception, but less than at least one (the heroine) the value of
implication of Human Dilemma.
In As
You Like It Phebe and Jaques can be put in their places, in a dance of
living and loving, by self-control and self-awareness, but without
self-sacrifice. In Twelfth Night,
affection is everywhere-among the heroic as among the foolish, among the
central characters as among the marginal –and self-sacrifice is necessarily
involved if it is to be defeated. Rosalind is able to use her disguise as a
genuine and joyous extension of her personality; Viola suffers constriction and
discomfiture in her role. It is properly representative says Hunter (1962: 41)
that the most famous speeches by the disguised Rosalind are her teasing
comments on
The poor
world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any
man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause…men have died from time
to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
While the most famous speech of the
disguised Viola is the melancholy description of her own imagined fate:
She never
told her love,
But let
concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,
Feed on her
damask cheek. She pin’d in thought;
And with a
green and yellow melancholy
She sat like
Patience on a monument
Smiling at
grief. Was not his love indeed? (2.4. 109-14)
further constricted, as the speech is,
in the context of Orsino’s assumption that women cannot love.
The vision of happiness is thus for
Viola a smiling through tears, a vision all the more poignant for its
unlikeliness to be fulfilled. To say this is to make Viola sound like the
‘archetype for much modern ‘brave little woman’ sentimentality. And she is not:
the play is too busy to let her even seem so. The sentiment is placed in a
current of cross-intrigues which keeps it from the stagnation of
sentimentality. Happiness is a perpetual possibility which has to be shelved
away as soon as it is exposed (for matters, not hostile, but more immediately
pressing, always intervene); it is a single thread in a broadloom that is
largely made up of threats and deceptions. (cf. Hunter 1962: 42)
However, Hunter (1962: 43) explains the
complications introduced by the sub-plot are not to be limited to the intrigues
it contains; what we have here is not a
simple world of below-stairs bumbling and aping (as in Much
In addition, all the characters are
presented as victims of a need to hide from the facts about themselves (and
here Viola, though her disguise is forced on her and not chosen, must be joined
with the others): Olivia cannot bear to be known for what she is –a healthy and
nubile woman; Viola cannot permit herself to be known for what she is – a girl;
Orsino cannot permit himself for what he is – in lover in love with the idea of
love: Sir Toby cannot bear to be known for a parasite, Sir Andrew for a fool,
Malvolio for a steward. The process of the play is one which allows these
truths to be bearable (or socially organized) at the end of the action, not by
developing characters to a greater understanding, but simply by moving the plot
around till the major characters each find themselves opposite a desirable
partner and an escape-hatch from frustration. The new pattern at the end is
seen not only as personally satisfying, but also as socially desirable, certain
pretenders to civility (Malvolio and Sir Andrew) being rejected from the
pattern, in which the others express their own superior natures.
Finally, Twelfth Night is not, however, a comedy of wit. It is, on the other
hand, the most poetical (and musical) of the comedies; this is not to say that
a higher proportion of the lines are poetry, but it is more shot through and
through by the lyric abandon of poetic utterance:
Viola: If I
did love you in my master’s flame,
With such a
suff’ring, such a deadly life,
In your
denial I would find no sense;
I would not
understand it.
Olivia: Why,
what would you?
Viola: Make
me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call
upon my soul within the house; Write royal cantons of contemned love
And sing
them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your
name to the reverberate hills,
And make the
babbling gossip of the air
Cry out
‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest
Between the
elements of air and earth
But you
should pity me. (1.5. 248-60)
Poetic abandon of this kind continues
Hunter (1962: 45) is required in Twelfth
Night, because there is so little that the characters, disguised, obsessed
and frustrated as they are, can do; they are obliged to live out their
potentialities rather than deeds –potentialities dramatically enlarged in the
mirror of nostalgia for the impossible. This powerfully affects the image of
the lover that the play gives us. In As
You Like It we met the absurdity of the lover in
If music be
the food of love, play on,
Give me
excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite
may sicken and so die.
That strain
again! It had a dying fall;
O, it came
o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That
breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and
giving odour! Enough, no more;
‘Tis not so
sweet now as it was before. (1.1.1-8)
Seen in the context of Shakespeare’s work,
this melancholy mood of comedy in Twelfth
Night cannot well be kept apart from the tragic vision of the plays Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet which are its contemporaries. The
comedy ends with happiness for some, but the happiness has no inevitability,
and the final song sounds perilously like a tune whistled through the
surrounding darkness. The fate of Malvolio is proper enough in the context of
revelry, but the context is hardly strong enough to drown completely the
overtones of Hamlet; the malcontented
outsider is not always despicable. In Twelfth
Night the impetus towards reconciliation is sufficiently tentative to allow
such thoughts, and in the development of such thoughts lies the death of
Comedy. (cf. Hunter 1962: 50)
5. Conclusion
Each of Shakespeare’s plays is a unique
organism, as unique as an individual human being; but a number of them share
common elements and contrastive elements that I tried to develop in this paper.
The aim of this paper was to identify the common and contrastive elements of
love in each play, supported by the main women, the heroines, depending on the play
described.
6. Bibliography
Primary
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Secondary
1) Donno Story,
2) Hattaway, Michael. As You Like It – (The New
3) Hunter, G.K. Shakespeare: The Later Comedies.
4) Maguire, Laurie E. Studying Shakespeare: a guide to the plays.
5) Mares, F. H. Much