Shakespeares comedies conservative or transgressive?

? Dr Emma Smith asks whether Shakespeares comedies, despite their transgressive appearance, ultimately reinforce the norms of gender and class. In our own society, comedy is something of a battleground. Is a sitcom about a dwarf acceptable? Can a comedian use a disparaging word about disabled people on Twitter and claim it was meant humorously? Can we make a comedy film about inept suicide bombers, or laugh at wheelchair users who scamper about when no-ones looking, or find a mock-Indian accent funny? The cumulative sense from our current anxieties about proper subjects for comedy suggests that comedy and controversy are two sides of the same coin. To be funny is to push boundaries of taste and acceptability. Comedy is a radical, anti-authoritarian form: less feel-good than feel-uneasy. This is exemplified in Umberto Ecos medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose, which circles around a lost Aristotelian treatise on comedy, suppressed by the church because a serious philosophy of comedy is too dangerous to its own hierarchical structures. Comic Heroines Can we say the same about Shakespeares comedies? Well, at first sight, perhaps. Take The Merchant of Venice, for instance: here we see a woman, Portia, dressing as a male lawyer to save her husbands best friend in court. She proves herself a better advocate than the men present, and in a rhetorical and forensic tour de force, turns the tables on the Jewish moneylender Shylock and gains Antonios freedom. The play thus proposes a vision of female intellectual capability far beyond what we might expect from the average male Elizabethan theatre-goer; few women went to the theatre in the sixteenth century, and those who did either were, or were thought to be, prostitutes looking to meet clients). We could say something similar about the representation of women throughout Shakespeares comedies: they are active think Viola in Twelfth Night; witty think Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing; and they get what they want think As You Like Its Rosalind. Prominent, active roles for women are one of the defining features of comedy for Shakespeare, which is part of what makes Measure for Measure so generically uncertain: Isabella begins that play as a comic heroine but tails off in the plays second half, eclipsed by the regenerated Duke. Thats to say, in their representation of female agency, Shakespeares comedies challenge the social orthodoxy of their time. Anything Goes Furthermore, all these female characters were played by male actors. Preachers of the time thundered that all men are abominations that put on womens raiment (John Rainolds in 1599), and even suggested that cross-dressing undermined gender boundaries: our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern between sex and sex, and therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind Philip Stubbes in 1583 Part of what is worrying to these moralists is that the performance of gender on the stage shakes the very foundation of a social system that is based on the essential superiority of men

over women. Shakespeares comedies have great fun with cross-dressing and flirt with the homosexual desirability of the transvestite actor: Orsino and Olivia are both drawn to the androgynously sexy Viola in Twelfth Night, giving the plays subtitle, What You Will, a saucy hint of anything goes. Like other cross-dressed heroines, Viola never reappears in her female clothes and Orsino continues to address her as Cesario even as he acknowledges his love for her: heterosexual gender norms are not reinstated. As in Rosalinds teasingly flirtatious epilogue to As You Like It, the ending of Twelfth Night is reluctant to relinquish the erotic fun and possibility created by Violas sexually ambiguous persona. In terms of gender representation, therefore, Shakespeares comedies seem to challenge conservative orthodoxies and present themselves as socially transgressive. Class Boundaries But there is another side, too, in which comedies reveal themselves as socially conservative, reinforcing hierarchies and boundaries even as they seek to play with them. Class boundaries are firmly observed in Shakespeares comedies (not for him Marlowes interest in characters who transcend their humble origins). While Rosalind is disguised as Ganymede in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, she attracts the romantic interest of Phoebe. Although there is much teasing of the unwitting Phoebe, her mistake is not primarily that Ganymede is really female, rather that he is her social superior. You are not for all markets,' Rosalind tells her, urging her towards her shepherd suitor: love him, take his offer (Act 3 Scene 5 lines 61-3). The servant Malvolios fantasy of marrying his mistress Olivia in Twelfth Night results in his humiliating punishment. The twin servant Dromios in The Comedy of Errors are regularly beaten to make clear their inferior status. Here Comes the Bride Shakespeares comic heroines assert themselves, to be sure, but their spirited agency is directed towards the most normative of female destinies, marriage. We can be sure if any woman in a Shakespeare comedy asserts that she does not want a husband, the plot will contort itself to make sure she gets one: springing Isabella from the convent to plead for her brother Claudios life in Measure for Measure, letting loose the twins amidst Olivias excessive mourning in Twelfth Night, setting the elaborate hoax to persuade Beatrice who would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he love me (Much Ado About Nothing Act 1 Scene 1 lines 125-6). Perhaps The Taming of the Shrew makes this tendency to enforced marriage clearest. Everyone in Padua her suitor Petruchio, who desires to wive it wealthily (Act 1 Scene 2 line 74), Bianca, who cannot marry before her older sibling, and Baptista, burdened with an independent daughter wants Katherina to marry, save Katherina herself. Its a matter of interpretation whether she is ultimately persuaded by the plays conclusion, in which she performs the role of obedient wife in front of her incredulous family. So marriage is the only possible outcome for women at the end of Shakespeares comedies, and their freedom within their plays might be read merely as the liberty to insert themselves more totally in patriarchal structures. Peace, Ill stop your mouth, says Benedick to Beatrice at the end of the play (Act 5 Scene 4 line 97). Romantics might see this as the longed-for kiss between these two will-they-wont-they soulmates, but cynics might see the emblematic silencing of the feisty female character in marriage; Beatrice never speaks again for the

remainder of the play. And where comic women choose their own husbands free from paternal control, they seem to choose exactly the husbands their fathers would have chosen, had they been able to do so. Rosalinds Orlando is the son of her fathers old ally, Violas father knew Orsino, and even Perdita, in the comic second half of The Winters Tale, has chosen a suitable partner; unbeknownst to her, she is a princess worthy of her disguised prince-lover, and Florizel is the son of her fathers estranged best friend. Comic plots do not tend to endorse the idea of womens autonomy, nor to encourage them to rebel, except temporarily, about gender roles. Looked at from this perspective, comedies are ultimately conservative, indulging their protagonists in fleeting liberation but clanging the door of orthodoxy shut in conclusion. Laughter and Cruelty In part this may relate to a function of comedy often thought to be intrinsically conservative. The historian Keith Thomas writes that in the Tudor period, mockery and derision were indispensable means of preserving orthodox values and condemning unorthodox behaviour: laughter functions as a means of social control. Sir Philip Sidney gives a similar suggestion in his Elizabethan The Defence of Poetry: laughter is a scornful tickling in which we laugh either at sinful things we should reject, or at miserable things we should pity. Laughter, as the modernist French philosopher Henri Bergson put it two centuries later, is a corrective which seeks to remedy behaviour that is out of line. Bergson argues that in order for comedy to be effective, we must retain a kind of cold distance from the object of humour. It requires, he writes in a memorable phrase, a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Bergsons suggestion is a version of the silent film comedian Charlie Chaplins distinction: life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, a comedy in long-shot. It is distance, emotional or physical, that enables our laughter. Bergsonian comedy suggests a kind of cruelty on the part of the spectators, who do not involve themselves emotionally in what is happening before them, choosing instead a harsh and heartless judgement: laughter. Its a view that challenges the assumptions of collective feel-good and replaces that warmth of shared mirth with the scornful and derisive laughter of objectification. Is this how Shakespeares comedies work? Its true that we tend to laugh at rather than laugh with the characters the habitual technique of dramatic irony (we know more than the characters). Combined with Shakespeares apparently unsympathetic class politics, this tends to mean that we, the audience, experience a general feeling of superiority over comic characters. We know that the confusions in Ephesus are because there are two sets of identical twins, or that Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona is disguised as a man, or that Dogberry, the comic constable in Much Ado About Nothing, is muddling words and saying the opposite of what he means. We observe, rather than participate in, comic confusions. Bergsons framework of comic cardiac anesthesia would suggest that our response is judgemental rather than empathic, superior rather than comradely, and disinterested rather than absorbed in these human dramas. Its an unsentimental vision of Shakespeare comedy, more the rain it raineth every day (Festes epilogue to Twelfth Night) than hey nonny no (the repeated song in Much Ado About Nothing). Back, perhaps, to those edgy, uncomfortable modern comedy dilemmas with which I began. Further Reading Henri Bergsons Laughter is at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4352. Philip Sidneys Defence of Poetry can be read at http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-

editions/defence.html. The best overview of Shakespeares comedies is Penny Gays The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeares Comedies. Dr Emma Smith is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Hertford College Oxford where she teaches Shakespeare and early modem literature. Her most recent book is The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (2007). This article first appeared in emagazine 57, September 2012.