6

‘And all their minds transfigur’d’: Shakespeare’s early comedies

The Comedy of Errors, unlike most ancient and Italian comedies based on mistaken identity, depends on an accident, the lusus naturae of twins, rather than on contrivance or intrigue. Coleridge claimed that this difference distinguished farce from comedy and his judgment has long influenced critical evaluation of the play. Farce, most critics agree, subordinates character to plot and action, and The Comedy of Errors is generally read and played as farce. Its plot, we are told, invites preoccupation with action rather than with character. Since in the criticism of Shakespeare, characterization continues to be a primary criterion of evaluation, Errors must be, as the traditional judgment has it, ‘apprentice-work, a typical remaniement of a Plautine original’.¹

Such a view, however, ignores the play’s poetry which invites interest not solely in its action, but in its characters, in Antipholus of Syracuse and Adriana, the other twin’s unhappy wife. Poetry endows these characters with an inner life which holds our attention and makes the fate of Antipholus of Syracuse significant and important. We want him to find himself through union with Luciana and his family. Shakespeare’s emphasis on the character of the traveling brother represents the most fundamental change he works on his Plautine original; instead of focusing on the settled, house- holding sibling, Shakespeare concentrates on Antipholus of Syracuse’s quest for his lost twin. Whereas Plautus presents us with two characters ‘sufficiently alike so that each may fit interchangeably into the other’s situation’, Shakespeare creates two different characters whose behavior in response to similar errors and cross-purposes reflects their individualized selves.²

The most obvious formal difference between the two and also the most important for our purposes is that the traveling brother is given a series of soliloquies, whereas the resident brother has none. The first of such speeches comes in I, ii, immediately after the frame scene with Egeon and reveals a character wholly different not only from both Plautus’ twins, but from Antipholus of Ephesus as well:

He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth

(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.³

(I, ii, 33–40)

In the past twenty years Errors has inspired renewed interest in readers who have recognized in the play themes and techniques which Shakespeare uses throughout his dramatic career, not necessarily in ovo, but exploited with a sureness of dramatic understanding and skill characteristic of his later comedy.⁴ Critics interested in the play often begin with this soliloquy in which Antipholus betrays a residual sense of self which persists beyond his function in the plot. The speech initiates the play’s theme of identity, and if Errors is indeed Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, these lines mark the beginning of a central paradox of the problem of identity and self- knowledge as Shakespeare treats it: Antipholus of Syracuse will ‘find’ himself, like Charisios and Knemon in Menander or Flamminio in Gl’lngannati, by ‘losing’ himself.⁵ He is searching not simply for a lost brother, but for his own identity. In recognizing man’s smallness and insignificance through the famous water-drop image, Antipholus communicates his own isolation from his fellows and the sense of confusion and loss of identity which the play investigates.⁶ Throughout the play Antipholus’ lines, particularly his monologues, reveal his deepest fear, a loss of self conveyed through his preoccupation with and fear of change, a major theme and pattern of imagery in Errors.⁷

Antipholus of Syracuse and his Dromio part company immediately before this speech: Dromio goes in search of an inn with his master’s money; Antipholus decides to explore the town. Shakespeare’s handling of this parting is a skillful preparation for the comic business to follow, namely the first error, in which Antipholus of Syracuse mistakes Dromio of Ephesus for his servant and demands his money. Confronted with the very loss of self which he believes necessary to finding his family, Antipholus clings doggedly to his gold, a tangible object on which he feels his identity depends. In his second soliloquy following this farcical interchange, Shakespeare establishes the depth of Antipholus of Syracuse’s anxiety over the loss of self so resignedly described earlier in the scene. The fears Antipholus voices about Ephesus are not simply that it is filled with conycatchers and dissemblers, or that its magic will ‘deceive the eye’, but that ‘dark-working sorcerers’ and ‘soul-killing’ witches will ‘change the mind’, and ‘deform the body’ (I, ii, 98 ff.). Though this nexus of imagery derives from ACTS XIX, Shakespeare links it carefully to the theme of identity which he explores in this play.⁸ What Antipholus fears most is change and transformation of the self, not material or physical harm.

This transforming power becomes increasingly identified with women – with Luciana and the Abbess, and in a different way, with Adriana. Her long speech in II, ii about marriage, based on the neo-Platonic notion of the marriage bond as transforming two into one, states explicitly the theme of identity: ‘O how comes it,/That thou art then estranged from thyself?’ (II, ii, 119–20). Adriana describes marriage with the neo-Platonic figure, extending Antipholus’ water-drop image when she argues that marriage is the confounding of self in the ‘breaking gulf’; nor can the drop which is individual man be recalled ‘unmingled’. Antipholus threatens throughout the action to escape Ephesus, to ‘be gone the sooner’, but he cannot depart before ‘confounding’⁹ himself both in marriage and in his family.

After the confrontation with Adriana we find one of those monologic speeches which, without being strictly an aside, is nevertheless outside the dialogue structure of the scene:

What, was I married to her in my dream?

Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?

What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?

Until I know this sure uncertainty

I’ll entertain the offer’d fallacy.

(II, ii, 182–6)

Confronted with two women both of whom seem to know him and question the identity he believes to be his, Antipholus of Syracuse responds with a monologue cast as dialogue at just that moment in the plot when his sense of identity is questioned. We find the series of rhetorical questions characteristic of such speeches which set up the I/you dichotomy of dialogue. The switch from the first to third person, from Ί’ to ‘our’, as in Angelo’s soliloquy in Measure for Measure, includes the audience in the errors and mistakes which Antipholus experiences. The inverted syntax of ‘sleep I now’ and the oxymoron ‘sure uncertainty’ signal an unhomogen- eous structure of answer and response. Even this short speech reveals many of the features of dialogue which we have remarked upon in earlier soliloquies and monologic fragments, from Menander and Latin comedy through the Italian Renaissance plays. Such rhetoric serves to convey the quality of an inner life so often said to distinguish Shakespeare’s characters from those of his predecessors.

Antipholus speaks these lines early in the action, but unlike Angelo, he has made no unexpected discovery about his inner nature. Consequently he questions the senses, first his own in the opening lines, then those of others. This significant difference – Angelo’s preoccupation with internal experience, Antipholus’ with external ‘error’ of sense impressions – suggests the direction in which Shakespeare developed the comic soliloquy.

This scene shows us, nevertheless, Antipholus’ changing view of his circumstances. Though he wonders if he might be dreaming or sleeping, he is basically secure in his conviction of self. He will only ‘entertain’ a ‘fallacy’. By the end of the scene, however, Antipholus seriously questions his identity:

Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?

Sleeping or waking, mad or well advis’d?

Known unto these, and to myself disguis’d,

I’ll say as they say, and persever so,

And in this mist at all adventures go.

(II, ii, 212–16)

Unlike the stolid Antipholus of Ephesus who never doubts his identity but only assumes others are drunk or mad, Antipholus of Syracuse questions himself. Shakespeare uses rhetorical schema to represent his divided mind: antitheses (line 213), anaphora, and chiasmus (line 214). In Angelo’s speech we also find antithesis, but its two halves fall in different lines, de-emphasizing formal rhetorical balance; the less schematic structure better communicates the nuances of Angelo’s complex psychological state. These lines show Antipholus learning that identity depends at least in part on others’ conceptions of him: on self, but as Adriana has suggested in her speech, on other as well.

The play does not merely imply that Antipholus changes. Shakespeare is very explicit in having the traveling brother describe himself as changed and re-created. Like so many Shakespearean protagonists, Antipholus is changed by his relationship with his beloved, Luciana. Through her for the first time he is able to see change and transformation in positive terms:

Are you a god? would you create me new?

Transform me then, and to your power I’ll yield.

(III, ii, 39–40)

Luciana, like Bargagli’s Drusilla, is identified with the divine, and hers is a positive transforming power rather than the witchcraft and cozenage identified elsewhere in the play with Ephesus and its inhabitants. Antipholus has recognized the lesson of Adriana’s earlier words; he sees in love and marriage a union of two in one which he makes explicit in this scene:

It is thyself, mine own self’s better part,

Mine eye’s clear eye, my dear heart’s dearer heart,

My food, my fortune and my sweet hope’s aim,

My sole earth’s heaven, and my heaven’s claim.

Call thyself sister, sweet, for I am thee.

(III, ii, 61–4, 66)

Loss of self in the other, Luciana, whose name means light, enables Antipholus to find himself, but here the process is not complete. Though he accepts the other in the person of Luciana, he continues to ignore the rest of the world: Luciana’s continuing assertion of his duty to Adriana and his own search for his brother and mother. Like the lords of Love’s Labour’s Lost, or Romeo, or Orlando before he is educated by Rosalind – all Shakespearean lovers for whom love is self-absorption, dramatized by their excessively Petrarchan language – Antipholus describes his feelings in strikingly hyperbolic terms:

Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;

Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs,

And as a bed I’ll take thee, and there lie,

And in that glorious supposition think

He gains by death that hath such means to die;

Let love, being light, be drowned if she sink.

(III, ii, 47–52)

Luciana, a realist like so many of Shakespeare’s heroines when confronted by such vows, cries ‘What, are you mad that you do reason so?’ Through love for Luciana Antipholus will confound himself once more. As a siren, she lures sailors to their deaths. Death here puns on the sexual meaning: he will embrace death encountered through her. Such selfdramatization and preoccupation with the rhetoric of love is always criticized by Shakespeare; he never allows love so presented to reach fruition.¹⁰ It must either be tempered and educated to accommodate a larger world than that of the lovers alone or else end in tragedy.

Dromio’s entry on the scene and his description of Luce with its bestial imagery is an effective counterbalance to Antipholus’ idealizing love. Dromio undergoes a parallel transformation. He also questions his identity, asking ‘Do you know me sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?’ (lines 72–3). Instead of a lover, he becomes an ass. Seen through the sobering lens of Dromio’s descriptive powers, Luciana is no longer divine, but a ‘witch’ who is ‘possessed’, whom Antipholus must escape ‘lest myself be guilty to self-wrong’ (line 162). He must rediscover his family and be reconciled to the world of Ephesus before he can find himself and be united with Luciana. To Antipholus of Syracuse, identity ultimately depends upon society: esse is percipi.¹¹

At IV, iii Antipholus of Syracuse responds to one more confusion on Dromio’s part,

This fellow is distract, and so am I,

And here we wander in illusions —

Some blessed power deliver us from hence!

(IV, iii, 40–3)

We do not see him again until his mother the Abbess, another woman with transforming power, delivers him from the maze of error in which he has confounded himself. Both literally and figuratively, Antipholus of Syracuse, the stranger and traveler of the play, unlike his twin, is willing to recognize he is ‘distract’. This willingness to question himself makes him susceptible to change and leads him back to his family and to love.

But without Antipholus of Syracuse, whose speeches suggest his inner life, the play becomes the ‘intricate impeach’ the Duke describes in the final scene. We become more preoccupied with the action and the unraveling of errors, as in farce, than with the characters, because the character whose poetry best conveys his inner life is missing from the action. But even so Shakespeare continues the imagery of change and transformation through his emphasis on madness and Dr Pinch’s exorcisms, and in the Duke’s words ‘I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup’ (V, i, 271). When the errors are explained, Antipholus of Syracuse tells Luciana, ‘What I told you then,/I hope I shall have leisure to make good,/If this be not a dream I see and hear’ (374–6). Making good his understanding of her positive transforming power depends on the Abbess’s revelation, which at last permits his integration into the society of Ephesus – another significant change Shakespeare works on his Plautine model. In Plautus, the resident brother goes off to sell all and return to Epidamnum with his twin. In Shakespeare, Antipholus of Syracuse is integrated into the society of Ephesus through family and impending marriage.¹²

Themes of change and transformation permeate The Comedy of Errors; when coupled with the rhetoric of consciousness found in the comic soliloquy or aside, we have the impression of a character’s inner life and realistic development. Like Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is filled with imagery of change and metamorphosis, but when we go to the play in search of soliloquies or fragments of monologue which present a mind in conflict, self-conscious about such change, we are mostly disappointed. As G. K. Hunter remarks, the ‘psychological dimension of inner debate is not one that this play employs’.¹³ The lovers, though aware of having undergone a profound experience, have no self- consciousness about its meaning or implications. The fairy world itself is in some ways less an objective force in the plot than an almost allegorical rendering of the lovers’ mental lives, a making literal of the conflicts love engenders.

Readers have often remarked that the lovers are virtually indistinguishable,¹⁴ but their speeches reporting their experiences to Theseus at IV, i, when looked at closely, offer more than is usually admitted. Lysander’s lines (IV, i, 145 ff.) are filled with hesitations, parenthetical elements, and inverted syntax which represent a mind struggling with a profoundly disturbing experience not entirely ordered or understood. Demetrius’ long account which follows does not portray conflict, as represented in Lysander’s speech, but simply reports his actions and aims in going to the wood. His words convey little sense of struggle or self-examination; he is content to explain his change of heart by means of ‘some power’ (line 164). In the short dialogue which follows, the imagery of sight so important to the Dream, with its double meaning of vision or insight, returns to play a central role in the lovers’ interchange and report of their experience. Instead of the immediacy which characterizes Bottom’s account of his dream, to the lovers the events of the night are distorted, ‘small and undistinguishable,/Like far-off mountains turned into clouds’, and ‘double’, seen with ‘parted eye’ (IV, i, 186–9).¹⁵ Demetrius’ lines (lines 191–4) which follow display the rhetorical questions and allusions to dream characteristic of Antipholus’ speech, but here such features are not set apart from the dialogue in order to suggest inner confusion. Instead of the first person singular, Demetrius casts his questions in the plural and speaks for all the lovers.

Shakespeare downplays the lovers’ responses to their experience, subordinating them to another dramatic purpose: to emphasize Bottom’s soliloquy which ends the scene. By deliberately minimizing the immediacy and self-consciousness of the lovers’ reflections, Shakespeare saves the dramatic moment for Bottom’s struggle to put his experience into language: his cue has come, and he answers it. Having learned how to manipulate the conventions for rendering consciousness, here Shakespeare plays with those strategies, endowing Bottom rather than his lovers with a speculative inner life – Bottom the ass, with his malapropisms, stubborn literalness and stolid imperturbability in his relations with his fellows and the fairies. Ironically he has the most perceptive and telling moment of revelation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In his soliloquy we hear his mind moving through the experiences of the night, taken aback by their fantasy and improbabilities, for once in the play almost at a loss for words. Caught up in the night’s implausibilities, even Bottom is incredulous. His sense of having had a vision, his broken prose lines which represent the stumbling movement of his mind over the night’s events, the careful rhetorical repetitions juxtaposed with his mixed metaphors of biblical allusion, all play with what I have termed the rhetoric of consciousness, parodying its strategies so as to show the irony of the woodland fantasy and to intimate the lovers’ limitations. His soliloquy also bespeaks his artistic aspirations, for he wants to order his experience into song. Act IV, i is peculiar in that it leaves hanging two such moments, promised but never represented. The lovers exit pledging that along the way they will recount their experiences to Theseus and Hippolyta; similarly Bottom promises to sing ‘Bottom’s Dream’ before the Duke at the end of Pyramus and Thisbe, as a kind of coda, it would seem, and commentary on the lovers’ tragedy.¹⁶ But we never hear either Bottom’s dream transformed into song or the lovers’ accounts of their nocturnal adventures.

Though part of the subplot, Bottom nevertheless figures as a comic protagonist in A Midsummer Night’s Dream because of his central role in bringing about the reunion of Oberon and Titania. When they ‘are new in amity’ (IV, i, 86) all of the other characters can at last resume their proper identities and be themselves reunited with their appropriate mates. Many Shakespearean clowns have soliloquies, such as Launce’s to his dog, or Costard’s lamenting his remuneration, but their set speeches have little relation to the main plot’s developing action. By endowing one of his plebeian characters with an inner life, by presenting Bottom as more sensitive, however garbled and comic, in his understanding and desire to memorialize the woodland adventure, Shakespeare links Bottom with his comic fellows in the later comedies who, however more self-conscious and witty, use language to subvert social, political or sentimental hierarchies.¹⁷ Vain and ignorant, Bottom’s exuberance and histrionic desires help him make an imaginative leap we never see the lovers make. Only Hippolyta recognizes in the lovers’ jointly recounted, if offstage, tales of love’s power, ‘minds transfigur’d’ (V, i), rather than mere ‘fancy’s’ images; we have no sense that they are self-conscious about the changes wrought by their adventures. On the contrary, their responses to the mechanicals’ interlude witness a devaluation of the power of imagination and a corresponding over-valuation of what cool reason comprehends.

As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so in Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘reason and love keep little company together’ (III, i, 138–9). Each of the courtiers discovers the truth of Berowne’s claim that their vow to study in retreat is out of season. In the wonderfully dramatic scene in which each lord discovers his love and is discovered by his fellows, finally Berowne himself, whose downfall we have awaited with amusement and a sense of inevitability, is exposed. All the lords are transformed by love and forced to recognize their essential humanity: ‘We cannot cross the cause why we were born’ (IV, iii, 214).¹⁸ But that change is presented comically, with no attempt to represent mental conflict. Indeed, part of the scene’s comic effect depends on the very superficiality and lack of conflict or reflection in those changed allegiances, from the contemplative to the active life.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, as in later sixteenth-century Italian comedy, symmetry precludes sympathy. Here the love of women is not the individual human passion Shakespeare dramatizes in his love comedies, but a mating game. When the ladies trade favors so that each lord woos the wrong beloved, the lords, ‘Following the signs, woo’d but the sign of she’ (v, ii, 469). This line sums up the behavior of the courtiers and accurately characterizes how language functions in the play. The elaborate puns, quibbles and word-play between Moth and Armado, Berowne and the others, Boyet and the ladies, among the lords and ladies themselves, all illustrate Shakespeare’s use of language to further the theme of error and misunderstanding. The characters delude themselves with their own language: the lords with the heroic style of proclamation and vows, and later with Petrarchanism; Armado by his stereotypical boasting and absurdity; Holofernes by his learning and pedantry. Synecdoche, one of the play’s most frequent figures, mirrors the minds of the characters, particularly the lords who continually mistake the part for the whole.

One speech of Berowne’s, however, deserves analysis. In this short soliloquy immediately preceding the revelation scene, Berowne discovers his love quite differently from the subsequent revelations of his fellows. Instead of sonneteering, we have Berowne speaking his only prose speech in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Though he uses prose in dialogue with Costard and Armado, all his major speeches but this one are in verse so rhetorically gaudy and elaborate as to obscure any sense of self-revelation. Here, however, prose works by contrast to reveal his thoughts more openly than elsewhere in the play:

The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a pitch, – pitch that defiles: defile! a foul word. Well, set thee down, sorrow! for so they say the fool said, and so say I, and I the fool: well proved, wit! By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax: it kills sheep, it kills me, I a sheep: well proved again o’ my side! I will not love; if I do, hang me ; i’ faith, I will not. O! but her eye, – by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her; yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o’ my sonnets already: the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady! By the world, I would not care a pin if the other three were in. Here comes one with a paper: God give him grace to groan!

(IV, iii, 1–19)

The opening metonymic shift from factual statement, ‘The king is hunting the deer’, to ‘I am coursing myself’, in which Berowne substitutes an aspect of the hunt, ‘coursing’, for the hunt itself, and then puns on the word, which also meant ‘to turn over in one’s mind’, admirably moves the audience into Berowne’s mind. The paranomasia which follows, built on the contrast between what the other lords are doing and what Berowne is feeling, suggests associative thought. Unlike other soliloquies we have considered, Shakespeare does not use rhetorical questions here – in fact, though we have several indicators which suggest dialogue, the dialogue seems less with the self than with an imagined interlocutor, the subjects of the imperatives ‘set thee down’ and ‘hang me’. This imaginary dialogue is first with ‘sorrow’, whom Berowne addresses, and then with ‘wit’, which might suggest inner debate, but here suggests rather a praise of Berowne’s witty proof, more self-congratulation than self-examination. In the following lines, he in fact moves from wit which proves, to address his ‘side’. The imperative, ‘hang me’, though certainly a means of self-address, creates an independent listening persona more than a sense of Berowne’s conscience or inner self. The movement from sorrow to fool to Berowne himself, and from Ajax to killing sheep to Berowne again, suggests not only his quick wit, but also his degraded attitude toward love, reminding us of his earlier verse soliloquy in III, i, in which he imagines himself as the signor junior, giant dwarf, dan Cupid’s corporal and Rosaline as a German clock. The very self- consciousness with which Berowne calls attention to his rhetorical flourishes emphasizes that he is a man of surfaces whose mind works more in tropes than in schemes. This short dialogue with self dissolves into the traps of Petrarchanism which have ensnared the other lords, the shift marked by the antistrophic repetition of eyes, and the allusions to riming and melancholy. Our momentary glimpse into Berowne’s mind is cut off by the codified language of love. If Love’s Labour’s Lost is about finding a language which communicates love, Berowne, like his fellows, never seems to find the proper accent, rhythm or substance.

Love’s Labour’s Lost presents a social model of language in which meaning is determined within a context by the auditor as well as the speaker, just as identity is determined within social relationships and material conditions as well as by the self. Language and identity are relative, dependent at least in part on the world outside rather than on the self within.¹⁹ The courtiers, represented by Berowne, are unable to escape from the disguise language represents. When he attempts honest plain words, his speech is as elaborate and conceited as ever. Rosaline and the other ladies decry this insincerity and require each lord to prove his love over time. Berowne claims that the ladies are responsible for their lovers’ false vows. His religious language, ‘sin’, ‘purifies’, and ‘grace’, though it suggests the pattern of sin, confession and regeneration characteristic of Shakespeare’s late comedies and romances, and of the comme- dia grave, seems just one more disguise, a conceit rather than a deepened conception of past action and future behavior. We never have a sense in Love’s Labour’s Lost that the characters have learned from their experiences or that an inner life governs their behavior, for the symmetry of the action reminds us forcibly that we watch a play.

The rhetorical features common to Shakespeare’s comic soliloquies share features with set speech soliloquies of selfrevelation characteristic of early Elizabethan romantic comedies such as Common Conditions and Clyomon and Clamydes. Typically in these early plays a scene ends with a resumé of the action and a presentation of the character’s state of mind. In the case of Antipholus’ or even Bottom’s soliloquies, their speeches do both. But the way in which they accomplish these tasks is quite different from the set speeches of Clyomon and Clamydes and Common Conditions. Take, for example, the first few lines of Neronis’ soliloquy in which she is converted to loving Clyomon. The plot is based on the fourteenth-century prose romance Perce forest, and this speech begins with a poem or song ‘How can that tree but withered be/That wanteth sap to moist the root?’ The soliloquy proper begins accordingly as follows:

Neronis, ah I am the Tree, which wanteth sap to moy st the roote.

Neronis, ah I am the vine, whose Plants are troden under foote.

I am the spray which doth decay, and is with wild weeds overgrowne,

I am the wight without delight, which shows, and hath no good wil showne.

Mine is the heart by whom alas, each pleasant joy doth passe,

Mine is the heart which vades away, as doth the flower or grasse.

In wanting sap to moyst the roote, is joyes that made me glad,

And plants being troden under foote, is pleasures that was had.

I am the spray which doth decay, whom cares have overgrowne,

But stay Neronis, thou saist thou showest, and hath no good will showne:

Why so I do, how can I tell, Neronis force no crueltie

Thou seest thy knight endued is, with all good gifts of courtesie:

And doth Neronis love indeed, to whom love doth she yeeld,

Even to that noble brute of fame, the knight of the golden Sheeld.

Ah wofull Dame, thou knowest not thou, of what degree he is,

Of noble blood his gesters showe, I am assured of this.

Why belike he is some runnagate that will not show his name,

Ah why should I this allegate, he is of noble fame.

Why dost thou not expresse thy love, to him Neronis then?

Because shamefastness and womanhood, bids us not seek to men.²⁰

(xi, 1002–21)

The fourteeners themselves, with their rigid regularity, unrelieved regular placement of the caesura and consequentially deformed syntax, are a far cry from colloquial speech and an unlikely medium for conveying any sense of ‘lifelikeness’. The line length and rhythm, the rhetorical repetitions, the internal and end rhymes, the romance diction and stereotypes, the endless apostrophes, all work to emphasize the soliloquy as artifice, a rhetorical set piece not designed to individualize character. The romance set speech tends to generalize rather than problematize feeling by likening the heroine’s situation to that of countless other young women in similar circumstances of unrequited love. However, Shakespeare situates such speeches in particular contexts with temporal markers, demonstrative pronouns and other features, as we have noted in Angelo’s and Antipholus’ soliloquies. Indeed we might say that far from demonstrating an inner life or character in excess of function, such speeches reveal characters as absolutely determined by their function in the romance or intrigue plot. Unrequited love, contemplated suicide, tragic discovery, and the like all have within the romance tradition conventional metaphorical commonplaces and generalized tropes for conveying those generically-bound experiences. Neronis’ soliloquy, despite its devices of self-address, is paradoxically univocal; it expresses an idea, the discovery of love, from a single point of view.

If we turn to a representative soliloquy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which Valentine mulls over his loss of Silvia, we find a kind of middle ground between the romance set piece and the strategies of self-revelation we have remarked in other Shakespearean comic protagonists:

And why not death, rather than living torment?

To die is to be banish’d from myself,

And Silvia is myself: banish’d from her

Is self from self. A deadly banishment.

What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?

What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?

Unless it be to think that she is by

And feed upon the shadow of perfection.

Except I be by Silvia in the night,

There is no music in the nightingale.

Unless I look on Silvia in the day,

There is no day for me to look upon.

She is my essence, and I leave to be,

If I be not by her fair influence

Foster’d, illumin’d, cherish’d, kept alive.

I fly not death, to fly this deadly doom:

Tarry I here, I but attend on death,

But fly I hence, I fly but away from life.²¹

(III, i, 170–87)

The rhetorical questions indicate inner debate, but as in Clyomon, we find no specifying links to the preceding scene – no temporal markers or demonstrative pronouns, and no attempt to problematize Valentine’s response to his experience. We also find the predictable diction, antitheses, and motifs of romance, rhetorically repeated, throughout: separation from the lover is likened to death, the beloved is all joy, light, nightingales, influence and essence. Such commonplaces generalize rather than individualize Valentine’s feelings.

In his suggestive study of Boccaccio, H. J. Neuschäfer analyzes the shift from the medieval exemplum to the new stylistic principles of the novella. He argues that exempla such as the generous friend who gives his own beloved to his friend, the rudimentary plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is problematized in the novella because ‘the characters, instead of being simply the means for illustrating an idea, possess a conscience’.²² The ideal of friendship and magnanimity is challenged by the constraints of the real – the more complex and reflective character of the friends themselves, and the beloved who refuses her status as an object. Boccaccio’s Sophronia possesses a conscience and unleashes a series of complications which problematize the exemplum, making it unruly, difficult to moralize.

This schema and description of the relation of exemplum to novella is useful in considering the relation of romance and early romantic comedies such as Common Conditions or Clyomon and Clamydes to the later comedies of Shakespeare. Shakespeare problematizes character in his comedies by endowing his characters with what we have termed a rhetoric of consciousness; he organizes soliloquies and monologic fragments as dialogue and complicates the relation of character to context by features of style such as colloquial verse forms, caesuras and breaks in thought which counter end rhymes and iambic rhythm, and by diction which counterpoints the predictable language of romance or tragedy. The soliloquy organized as dialogue provides a means for dramatizing the inner life of a given character, a means for creating that residue or excess which remains with us and makes Shakespeare’s characters seem complex and lifelike. But we find the fullest use of the convention of mistaken identity and the rhetoric of consciousness to develop comic character in his later romantic comedies.