All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered.
It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. What I have written in this book reflects a lifetime of reading and teaching and intellectual conversation, without which I fear I would have learned little. The list here is manifestly inadequate; my obligation is much wider than that.
I am most of all indebted to the spirit of collegiality that thrives in the world of Shakespeare studies and at the great universities Harvard University, the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Hawaii, Dominican University, the University of Victoria where I have been privileged to teach. As You Like It, 3. This book is dedicated to the proposition that the writings of Shakespeare reveal the workings of a great mind. True, we have no literary criticism or other theorizing as such from his pen.
That is because he is a dramatist with a special genius for allowing his characters to speak on their own behalfs without his editorial intervention. Shakespeare does not discuss philosophers very often, and may not have read widely in them. He cites Aristotle twice in throwaway comments see Chapter 4. He never mentions Plato or his Academy. We hear nothing of Agrippa, or Paracelsus, or Ramus. Shakespeare never names Montaigne, although his debt to one essay at least is evident in The Tempest.
Learned or not, the plays and poems are full of ideas. The titles of numerous critical studies underscore the importance of the topic. The notion is attractive because the things that are said by Hamlet, or Lear, or Macbeth, or just about any other thoughtful character are so wise and stimulating and eloquently expressed that we like to imagine that we can hear the author himself. Yet we must be vigilantly aware that each speaker is a narrative voice, even in the Sonnets and other nondramatic poems. If that is true in nondramatic verse, it is insistently more true in drama. He is a remarkable subject because he has revealed so little directly about himself while at the same time uttering such extraordinary wisdom that we want to understand him as a thinker.
Biographical information about him has accumulated in considerable detail, but not in the form of letters written by him, or recorded conversations. Shakespeare was a dramatist in ways that tend to conceal the author behind the work. He generally took his plots from known and published sources.
Titus Andronicus is seemingly based on a now-lost prose original of which analogs are still available. He adroitly made use of classical and neoclassical comedies by Plautus, Ariosto, and others in such plays as The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew. This wide use of sources was characteristic of other Renaissance dramatists as well. As such it points to an important feature of early modern dramatic writing: By that time Shakespeare may have been in London for a decade or so, gaining steadily in reputation as a dramatist: Yet official recognition in print came slowly.
The reason we have no manuscripts of his today, or correspondence, or any biography of him written during his lifetime, is that dramatists like Shakespeare were regarded as popular entertainers. When Thomas Bodley gave to Oxford University the library that today bears his name, instructing that institution to assemble in its collection every book published in England, he specified that they need not bother to include plays. The situation was perhaps like that of today in our cultural estimation of films: Even Ben Jonson had as his stepfather a mason, and was himself apprenticed for a time, albeit unwillingly, to that craft.
Playwriting was a trade, like acting. The dramatist was a journeyman, a craftsman. Our modern conception of creative writing as usually autobiographical in its method and subject would have seemed strange to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Their job was to fashion theatrical entertainments around popular and familiar stories. Such an idea of authorship tends to distance a play from its writer in terms of personal expression. Can an author who chronicles the story of a Richard II or Hamlet be assumed to be searching out ways to express his own views on politics or human destiny?
Patronage of the drama, and in other arts as well, tended to encourage this same sort of craftsmanship in which the maker subsumed his identity into the work at hand. Many of the great paintings of the Renaissance were executed at the behest of church authorities and wealthy patrons. Artists might be commissioned to provide representations of religious subjects for a particular location in a particular church.
The subject might well be dictated, such as the Annunciation, or the Descent from the Cross, in which case the details of composition might also be specified, including the size of the painting and the arrangement of the figures. Where, in such an instance, was there room for what we would call creativity? The same is true in the drama of the early modern period. Shakespeare wrote for his patrons, who were in his case the playgoing public of London. What kinds of pressures would he have felt? He imagines Shakespeare in a tavern, complaining to his drinking companions about the harsh demands placed on him by his unlearned spectators.
Marquis is of course exaggerating for comic effect, but his main point is still worth considering: In the title of his study of Shakespeare, As They Liked It, Alfred Harbage adroitly captures the idea that the greatest of English writers achieved his success in good part by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear.
He allows Falstaff, or Hotspur, or Cleopatra, or Lady Macbeth to speak his or her innermost thoughts as though without the intervening or controlling perspective of the author. The letter itself actually points in a slightly different direction: Plays vary greatly as to the extent to which they try to make an identifiable point. These are all extraordinary plays; to say that they are didactic, in that we can identify an authorial intent, is to make an analytical observation, not to put these plays down as in any way deficient. At the same time, the genre of drama offers a very different alternative.
It can encourage the clash of ideas in antithetical debate. Shakespeare is brilliant at this. Is Falstaff right, in Henry IV Part I, to celebrate joie de vivre and to revel in the ironies that surround the concept of honour in a time of war, or is Prince Hal right to conclude ultimately that Falstaff is a threat to public order?
In Antony and Cleopatra, are we to admire Antony for embracing the unrepressed hedonism of Egypt, or should we shake our heads in dismay at his collapse into sensuality? The debate can be internal: He himself is far from sure of the answer. What is being debated, and what are the arguments advanced on the various sides? Why do these issues matter, and to whom?
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How are our sympathies directed by the dialogue and the dramatic situation? His plays surely invite us to deplore murder and senseless bloodshed, to applaud charitable generosity, to dislike characters such as Iago or Edmund who are cunningly vicious and self-serving, to appreciate romantic heroines like Rosalind and Viola who are so patient and good-humoured and resourceful, and to deny our sympathy to tyrannical bullies like Duke Frederick in As You Like It or the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear while wishing the best for those like Edgar and Cordelia and Kent in King Lear who are outcast and persecuted for their courageous if imprudent rightmindedness.
This is not to assert that Shakespeare himself can be said to have endorsed those various views; no doubt we are inclined to suppose that he emphatically did, and that he wrote to foster such idealisms, but we simply have no direct evidence about the man himself. In the last analysis, the question is both unanswerable and unimportant. To be sure, we do have the testimony of Henry Chettle in that a certain playwright, unidentified by name but almost certainly Shakespeare, was widely regarded as a man of pleasant bearing and honest reputation.
Other testimonials tend to confirm that Shakespeare was well liked, though we need to remember that Greene seems to have despised Shakespeare as an unprincipled plagiarist. The plan of this book will be to proceed topically, asking what the plays and poems suggest in continual debate about an array of topics: I take up these topics, broadly speaking, in the order in which they seem to have fascinated Shakespeare.
Sex and gender are especially relevant in his early years while he is writing romantic comedies.
Shakespeare's Ideas (Blackwell Great Minds)
Politics become the central topic of the history plays that culminate in the great series about Henry V written in the late s. Religious controversy and sceptical challenges to orthodoxy come increasingly into focus as Shakespeare turns to the painful dilemmas of the great tragedies in the early years of the seventeenth century.
Finally, ideas of closure in both artistic and personal terms seem to be of deep concern to Shakespeare as he contemplates his approaching retirement from the theatre. At the same time, because these topics defy any neat chronological arrangement, and because the topics themselves constantly overlap as when issues of religion take on political dimensions , the examples and attitudes will range freely over the entire canon. In his early plays, he dwells in his romantic comedies on the nature of loving relationships, both opposite-sex and same-sex. What can humans discover about who they really are from the ways they behave when they fall in love?
What indeed is the very nature of gender? Is it inherent in the human constitution, or is it, in part at least, socially constructed? What role should loving friendship play in the formation of lasting relationships? When two men or two women experience feelings of deep love for one another, should erotic pleasure be embraced also?
These are questions that were bound to fascinate a youngish writer still in his late twenties and early thirties when he wrote the plays and poems of the s. Can we discern in them a developing political philosophy that might seem appropriate to a young author intent on understanding the history of his country and its political institutions, while pondering at the same time what England is like as a place for a young man of ambition to come to terms with the demands of male adulthood?
The history plays give Shakespeare immense scope for studying political impasse and the clash of contending ideologies. Is his response that of a political conservative or liberal? Is he a social conservative in his presentation of class differences, or something more iconoclastic? Is he a defender or critic of war? Is he suspicious of political activism by the common people, or is he sympathetic toward ideas of popular resistance to tyranny, or something of both? Do his ideas about such matters change over time? To the extent that we can see Shakespeare exploring a more Machiavellian view of historical change, even if as dramatist he withholds his own personal judgement of the matter, we can perhaps see some preparation for the depictions of religious and philosophical scepticism that are to come in the plays of the following decade.
His ideas on art seem well calculated to arm him for the encounter with the large philosophical problems shortly to come in his way. Poetry and drama are, to Hamlet and other eloquent speakers on the subject, ennobling enterprises, deeply moral in the best sense of promoting virtuous behaviour through positive and negative examples. Because great art is immortal, it is able to transcend human mortality and time. To be great art it must address itself to a highminded audience of those who truly understand; it must not cater to buffoonish tastes or mere popularity. The important thing, seemingly, is to be flexible and avoid dogmatism.
He makes use of it when it suits his purposes, and often not. He avoids intemperate theorizing. Questions of religious faith also come into special focus in and afterwards, as Shakespeare turned increasingly to the writing of problem plays and tragedies. In an age of heated religious controversy, Shakespeare seems to have found himself drawn more and more to the depiction of religious and ideological conflict.
He displays a deep knowledge of doctrinal differences, which he generally portrays evenhandedly. He makes use of anticlerical humour as did other dramatists and writers, but generally in a more temperate vein. Occasional disparaging remarks about Jews are offset by a characteristic Shakespearean sympathy for those who are the subject of ethnic or racial hatred. Toward Puritans he is less charitable, perhaps because of the virulent opposition of some religious reformers to the stage.
Toward questions of determinism versus free will and the existence of heaven and hell he is equally tactful and indirect. In the period of his great tragedies, Shakespeare explores pessimism, misanthropy, misogyny, and scepticism with devastating candour and ever-increasing intensity. Troilus and Cressida offers a totally disillusioning view of the most famous war in history and its demoralizing effects on both sides.
Human relationships fall apart. Supposed heroes betray their best selves in vain assertions of manhood. The dispiriting ending of Julius Caesar seems to illustrate the sad truth that human beings are sometimes their own worst enemies; in the unpredictable swings of history, nobly intended purposes too often result in the destruction of those very ideals for which the tragic heroes have striven. Othello and King Lear turn to even darker scenarios by introducing us to villains who see no reason to obey the dictates of conventional morality. The unnerving success of Edmund especially, down nearly to the last moment of King Lear, seems to demonstrate with frightening clarity that the gods worshipped by traditionalists like Lear and Gloucester will do nothing to aid old men in distress; indeed, the gods may not exist.
The deep pessimism and misanthropy of Timon of Athens and Coriolanus do nothing to relieve the existential angst. The genre of tragicomedy offers Shakespeare a dramatic form in which to fashion a series of happy endings out of the afflictions of his long-suffering characters. Bearing pagan names like Jupiter, Juno, Ceres, Iris, and Diana, they are the stage contrivances of tragicomedy. The self-aware artifice of these plays turns our attention to the dramatic artist and his craft as he prepares for retirement and death. The man who wrote them is largely inaccessible to us; the plays and poems must stand on their own.
Then, too, attitudes toward sex and gender are notoriously located in cultural norms or in deviations from those norms. To the extent that Shakespeare was inescapably a man of his time, writing for popular audiences, he was bound to take popular attitudes on sex and gender into account. Shakespeare may well have sensed a particular constituency in his audience to whom he wished especially to address the concerns embedded in his plays. London was of course not of one mind about matters of sexuality.
Citizens of this temperament tended to disapprove of profanity and anything they regarded as obscene or indecorous. They believed in upright dealings, both in their commercial life and in their domestic arrangements. They liked to think of themselves as decent Christians, piously obedient to the Ten Commandments and to the Beatitudes.
Sex and Gender the established Anglican church to promote an idea of companionate marriage in which the father was very much the head of household and yet was charged with maintaining a proper mutuality between husband and wife. Sex was no longer generally viewed as an inherently sinful passion, tolerated by the medieval Catholic church only in marriage and even then only under severe restrictions as to time and place. To English Protestants, sex was generally acceptable and even precious as a necessary physical fulfillment of a bond between man and woman that found its highest expression in a spiritual union of souls united for eternity and committed to the raising of a family.
To be sure, there were differences within the community thus defined, and these difference too could have mattered to Shakespeare and his acting company. Zealous reformers denounced playgoing entirely. Yet the drama had been used by Protestant officials to further the causes of the Reformation, and plays were undeniably popular in London, so that the adult acting companies could adopt various strategies to placate the more extreme reformers or at least appeal to moderates.
The plays for this company tended to support what we might call family values, but without pietistic fervour and often with a sense of humour and even a touch of playful daring. Sex and Gender 17 venues to comparatively affluent and sophisticated audiences made up in good measure of lawyers, law students, courtiers, and men about town. These theatres catered to what we might today call the avant garde. Their plays were judged so transgressive by the authorities, in fact, that they were closed down during most of the s, especially for political satire but also for trendy views on sexual mores.
The passage is unusual in Shakespeare for its topicality, and as such it highlights the sense of alarm that his acting company seems to have felt in its competition with the boy actors in matters of satire and public morality. He regularly tones down the sexual explicitness or experimental nature of his sources in a way that seems consistent with the mandate of his acting company and the Londoners to whom they apparently wished to appeal. An instance of this gentle expurgating is to be found in the Lucentio— Bianca plot of The Taming of the Shrew c.
Sex and Gender sought after by several wooers: This last wooer, the servant of a gentleman named Lucentio, disguises himself as Lucentio and presents himself as one of the competitors for the hand of Bianca in order that the real Lucentio may take on the disguise of Tranio and thus gain access to the household of Baptista Minola, where he hopes secretly to gain the affection of Bianca. This plot is one that Shakespeare borrowed from an Italian neoclassical play called I Suppositi , by Ludovico Ariosto.
It had been translated into vigorous and colloquial English by George Gascoigne as Supposes The prosperous old wooer, named Gremio in Shakespeare and presented to us as an amiable old codger intent on buying Bianca with his wealth, is in Ariosto an aged and miserly lawyer named Dr Cleander. The script misses no opportunity to laugh at him mercilessly not only for his grasping ways but also for his slovenly personal hygiene, his smelly armpits and crotch, and the like, with the suggestion too that he has a preference for young boys.
Whereas the disguised Lucentio and Bianca in Taming flirt with each other and manage to fall in love, the play offers no suggestion that they consummate their relationship until their marriage night at the close of the play. Polynesta is assisted in her affair by Balia, a nurse whose real function, as in many a fabliau, is to serve as a go-between or bawd. No such type appears in Taming. When Shakespeare does present us with a Nurse-duenna, as in Romeo and Juliet, he once again expunges the stereotypical function of her acting as a bawd.
Shakespeare alters his source material in Twelfth Night —2 to similar effect. The fact that he is actually named Silvio makes the confusion of identity all the more plausible. Only the eventual return of the actual Silvio to marry Julina resolves these difficulties. Shakespeare passes up a hilarious mixup about alleged fatherhood, seemingly in the interests of decorum. Perhaps he reflected too that the exposing of female breasts would not go well on the Elizabethan stage with a boy actor in the part of Viola. Sex and Gender well-matched contestants Beatrice and Benedick in the war of love, the other an Italianate tragicomic plot of sexual misunderstanding and deception.
He minimizes its sordid kinkiness. Even the villain in Much Ado is made less repellent, while Margaret is more easily forgiven. Although The Tempest c. Prospero insists on a proper restraint from the very first moment that Ferdinand and Miranda meet. Sex and Gender 21 will make sure that it does not proceed too swiftly. His plan of attack and motivation seem abundantly clear throughout: When Ferdinand resists, attempting to draw his sword, Prospero charms the young man from moving. Miranda has never seen her father so seemingly angry.
But If thou dost break her virgin-knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be ministered, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. Miranda says nothing, but her own chaste conduct confirms that she too has internalized the moral strictures taught her by her father. To be sure, other ideas of sexual behaviour are in evidence on the island of The Tempest.
Caliban, native to the place, has attempted to take Miranda as his sexual partner.
Shakespeare's ideas: more things in heaven and earth - David M. Bevington - Google Книги
Both are enslaved by Prospero; both must carry wood. He remains impenitent about his attempt: In his eyes, sexual desire is a natural procreative instinct, one designed to perpetuate the species. It is as natural as eating. Shakespeare characteristically gives ample play to this defence of sex as natural; Caliban is in many ways an attractive character, because he is a child of nature. To Prospero and Miranda, the attempt if successful would have been a rape, since Miranda vehemently objected. The contrast invites us to consider how there are two sides to most questions and certainly to this one.
Sex and Gender 23 of sexuality has a special merit. Ferdinand does win Miranda, as Caliban does not, and the children of Ferdinand and Miranda will unite the warring kingdoms of Naples and Milan in a way that has seemed heretofore impossible. Civilization has its discontents, of course, and sexual restraint imposes a neurotic limit on desire, but it does so in the interests of preserving marriage as a stabilizing force. Whether or not we agree today about denying sex before marriage, we can see in this late play of Shakespeare a debate in which the winning cards appear to be on the side of sexual restraint as a prelude to fulfillment.
Countering these conventional assurances, on the other hand, are many complexities that make for interesting drama. Relationships between men and women in the game of courtship are often embattled. Let us consider some of the ways in which young men and women in Shakespeare differ from each other.
Generally, in the romantic comedies of the s, the young women are much better at knowing themselves than are the young men. The women are plucky, patient, and good-humoured. They seem to enjoy teasing their young men, but do so knowing that they will submit themselves finally to their wooers. Marriage will put women in a subordinate position. They are aware of this, and accept the conditions of a patriarchal culture. They are intent on marriage, and generally know right away whom it is that they will marry. Although the men nominally take the lead in proposing marriage, the women are better aware of what is at stake.
The women seem smarter and more self-possessed. They are wittier and blessed with an ironic sense of humour that serves them well in dealing with masculine frailty. They are ultimately forgiving. Sex and Gender The men, conversely, seem woefully lacking in a sensible perspective on their own desires. They flee ineffectually from romantic attachments, or mistrust the women to whom they are attracted despite themselves, or are fickle in their choices.
They seem far more sensitive to the judgement of their male friends then are the women to the judgement of their female peers. Their male egos are painfully insecure. A cutting remark from a woman, or a jeering laugh from a male friend, can unnerve the men utterly. They are their own worst enemies. Romantic desire is too much of a distraction for men, they fear. Yet from the start we perceive that their resolves are hopelessly unrealistic.
When the Princess of France and her entourage of three ladies appear at the entrance to Navarre on a diplomatic mission, the men have no idea what to do.
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The men, on the other hand, go through painful contortions to hide from each other the desire they secretly are experiencing. When they are shamed into confessing to each other their weaknesses, they hit on a zany plan of disguising themselves as visiting Russians in order to pay court to the ladies, only to be mocked by the ladies for their pains and their perjuries.
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At the end, news of the death of the Princess gives the ladies an opportunity to postpone all romantic engagements for a year, in which time the ladies insist that the gentlemen get a better grip on themselves. The men have a lot to learn. The men, conversely, are constant to nothing other than to their aggressive rivalry. Demetrius, once a wooer of Helena, chases fruitlessly after Hermia, though knowing her to be in love with Lysander, until at length he is restored to his first affection.
Lysander similarly shifts from his engagement with Hermia to a mad pursuit of Helena and eventually to a renewal of his first love. These changes of affection in the men are occasioned, to be sure, by the love-juice that Puck squeezes on their eyes, but we are surely invited to consider the love-juice as essentially a symbolic anointment betokening the proneness of the male psyche to inconstancy of affection. Lysander leaves Hermia for Helena when Hermia has demurely refused to sleep right next to Lysander on the forest floor 2.
The love-juice is used only on the young men, and signals their repeated shifts in choosing the female objects of their desire. Bassanio, for his part, is a fine young man, and loyal to Portia, yet even here we encounter the comic subjection of the male. Bassanio is teased and tortured into acting out a fantasy of marital inconstancy from which Portia can release him by revealing that she herself was the learned doctor who played such a trick on him.
Portia and Nerissa accede to the patriarchal arrangement demanded by their culture in marriage, but not without making clear their own witty superiority as a form of control. Her addressing them both in this fashion dramatizes the customary understanding of marriage in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: Sex and Gender 27 daughter to the younger man, transferring ownership and authority. As Prospero says in The Tempest, addressing Ferdinand as his prospective son-in-law: Rosalind accepts all this, and yet she is indisputably the winner in a contest of wit between herself and Orlando.
Especially at the start of the play, she is adept at badinage and wordplay whereas Orlando is ashamed at his lack of refinement and education. A hint of detumescence hovers about this image. Rosalind must become his teacher. Her point is that Orlando will be a happier and better husband if he can begin to have a realistic understanding of what it is like for a man and a woman to live together, day after day and year after year.
Rosalind is, like so many other Shakespearean heroines, more wise, more emotionally mature, more ready for the complexities of a real relationship than is Orlando. The same is true in the love tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Finally, we have Viola and Orsino in Twelfth Night. Like Rosalind, the resourceful Viola accepts her role as loyally obedient to her lord and master, while at the same time undertaking to educate this gentleman in all that he does not know about courtship and marriage.
Orsino is infatuated at long distance with the Countess Olivia. Perhaps she senses, as we do, that his ardour for her is stereotypical; Olivia is for Orsino the unattainable goddess of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Being afflicted as he is with love melancholy, Orsino seems content to nurse his own exquisite suffering. Sex and Gender is like Phoebe, though of higher social rank, congratulating herself on the power she enjoys through withholding of her beauty. Viola has an answer for such sought-after beauties, which is to consider the costs to oneself of a frivolous denial of being truly in love.
The fiction of her male identity allows Viola to generalize about male behaviour without arraigning Orsino directly. What are we to make of this repeated configuration in the romantic comedies of the unselfknowing man and the patiently instructive woman? It is as though Shakespeare is expressing, on behalf of his fellow males, a self-critical view. Without denying them the ultimate position of superiority in the conventional hierarchy of a paternalistic culture, Shakespeare presents men as generally weak and helpless without the counsel and companionship of women.
The attitude toward women is correspondingly one of gratitude and admiration, along with perhaps a grudging anxiety about male dependence. The women do so, moreover, in a way that minimizes the hazards of male transition from immaturity to maturity. Even after marriage, to be sure, the pattern of witty women and dithering men can continue. Still, this is an unusual comedy for Shakespeare, with its uniquely English domestic setting and its portrayal of village life in Windsor.
Now, not all males in the romantic comedies are weak, to be sure. Even if the examples looked at thus far provide a compellingly consistent portrait of young men in love, they do not tell the whole story. Some males turn out to be remarkably self-assured, like Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. The reported shrewishness of Kate is to him a challenge, not a potential hazard. Yet for all his professed interest in wealth as his uppermost consideration, Petruchio finds in Kate a worthy opponent, one whose wit deserves to be answered in kind.
She in turn comes to find him more interesting by far than any of the other men she sees around her. She resists, of course, when he undertakes to tame her by putting on a grandiloquent display at their wedding and then dragging her off to his house before the wedding festivities are over.
He deprives her of food and sleep, plays the tyrant with the servants, and then boasts in soliloquy of his success: Whether the audience is to approve or disapprove of his behaviour as wooer and husband is today a celebratedly unsettled issue, but what can be said with confidence is that Petruchio knows what he is doing and that he succeeds in his own terms. He never wavers from his plan. He justifies it as he goes along by comparing his method to the taming of a hawk 4. He has won the argument. He does so by charming her into falling in love with the absurd Bottom.
At any rate, Oberon is the fairy king, and all that the fairies do seems upside down from our mortal perspective. The main point here is that he succeeds entirely in teaching Titania a lesson in wifely obedience.
She, like Kate in Taming, submits without question. When she is awakened from her trance by Oberon, and is shown her asinine lover lying by her side, her only response is one of revulsion: She offers not a word of reproof or hurt feelings. The victory is complete. And, lest we wonder if this is a dispensation taking place only in the fairy kingdom, we note that Theseus has conquered the Amazonian queen Hippolyta prior to the commencement of the play. A Midsummer is, among other things, a celebration of that male conquest.
Not that the exchanges are any less sharp and vehement. The difference is that a critical balance between the sexes is restored. Beatrice gives as good as she takes. It is as though Shakespeare revisits the scene of Taming with a view to equalizing the contest. Beatrice is not asked to submit, nor does Benedick simply win. To the contrary, when Beatrice has something momentous to ask of him, he listens seriously and agrees to try. For Benedick to challenge Claudio and thus incur the enmity of him and of their commanding officer, Don Pedro, is a heavy burden indeed.
If Much Ado represents something of an evolution in his thought about courtship, as compared with the earlier Taming, then perhaps Shakespeare is thinking his way through to a less paternalistic and less male-dominated idea about men and women. Sex and Gender A darker side of this debate about courtship concerns the propensity of men not just toward immature behaviour but toward irrational jealousy and possessiveness of women, as though a wife or sweetheart were a property to be guarded against the claims of other men.
Claudio in Much Ado is a notable instance. His immediate instinct, when he is told at the evening revels by Don John and Borachio that Hero is being wooed by Don Pedro, is to assume that the accusation is true. When Don John comes forward with a more serious accusation, that Hero is sleeping with other men, even on the eve of her marriage, Claudio is once again prepared to believe the worst of her. He scarcely knows her; his suspicion is toward women in general. What is more, the other men generally second his misogynistic view.
Only Benedick has the sagacity to be sceptical, as we have seen. It is to suggest that he is something less than a man. Claudio is eventually cured of his jealousy and restored to his Hero, but it is as though she has to be reborn for this to happen. Much Ado is in many ways an earlier study, with a happy ending, for Othello c. Desdemona is, like Hero, innocent of what her husband fears and suspects in her.
She is utterly devoted to Othello and so loyal to him that she readily forgives his harsh treatment of her. Even as she lies dying at his hands, she attempts to turn the blame away from him to herself. Sex and Gender 33 utterance is a lie intended to deflect suspicion from her abusive husband. Chapters on sex and gender, politics, writing, religion, and othertopics all suggest that though Shakespeare created characters withextreme and wide-ranging views, the world of the plays and thusperhaps of Shakespeare himself rewards compassion, understanding,forgiveness, duty, and above all, love.
In general, this is not abook for scholars; Bevington does not offer highly theoreticalreadings or bring up scholarly debates about meaning andtextuality. But his immense knowledge of the plays and the eraallow him to present complex ideas in an engaging, completelyreadable manner that will appeal to all readers, no matter theirbackground. Though it offers nothing new to those who study theplays for a living, everyone else will find it a masterpiece ofthoughtful investigation into the plays.
Lower- and upper-divisionundergraduates, graduate students, general readers. Castaldo, Widener University Choice, February "It's an absorbing journey, and one that will fascinate bothgeneral readers and serious scholars alike. I cannot think of a better, more judicious scholar to guide us through the complexities of Shakespeare's political and moral philosophy. Useful no matter what degree your acquaintance with the Bard. Harry Potter Years by J. Rowling , Hardcover Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 1 by J. Harry Potter Boxset Books by J. Pete the Cat I Can Read!
The Elf on the Shelf-a Christmas Tradition: He organizes his discussion into six main sections, each focusing on what he considers to have been significant issues for Shakespeare and his surrounding culture: Bevington lays bare the intellectual issues at stake and the risks inherent in the decisions that theatre practitioners must necessarily make.
He reminds the reader of the basics: Further, our assumptions about Shakespeare have real consequences for theatrical productions. He cautions naive readers and directors not to assume that our favorite Shakespearean characters are personal expressions of the Bard himself, or that they exist in textual isolation.
Nevertheless, Bevington clearly, if briefly, lays out the cultural and religious issues affecting the diverse population of the period and thus the theatrical representations of sexuality. This crackdown on satire and sex was, in part, a result of the Puritan-driven, highly political Marprelate controversy. Although these ideas and examples will