Introduction
1 See Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765) for the classic statement of this point of view. Johnson praises Shakespeare’s characters by claiming he ‘has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life…. This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life.’ But Johnson also criticizes Shakespeare’s conventional and unlikely plots, as in his often quoted complaint about the end of Twelfth Night.
2 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Ithaca, 1975, 29; for an early statement of this point of view, see Northrop Frye, ‘Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 271–7.
3 See Tzvetan Todorov, Littérature et signification, Paris, 1967, and A. J. Greimas, Sémantique Structural, Paris, 1966.
4 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction à l’analyze structurale des récits’, Communications, 8 (1966), 1–27, notes that stories in which a character in whom Tobjet et le sujet se confondent dans un même personnage sont les récits de la quête de soi-même, de sa propre identité’. In a strikingly similar passage in his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Merritt H. Moore, Chicago, 1936, rpt 1950, George H. Mead observed that ‘the self belongs to the reflexive mode. One senses the self only in so far as the self assumes the role of another so that it becomes both subject and object in the same experience’ (p. 63). See also Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, Ithaca, Cornell, 1978, which summarizes recent work and proposes a ‘paradigm of traits’ based on psychological descriptions of identity or personality.
5 In his essay, ‘ Character in a coherent fiction: on putting King Lear back together again’, Philosophy and Literature, 7 (1983), 196–212, Sanford Freedman observes that critics agree that any discussion of character ‘must start with characters’ words’, (p. 203).
6 See, for example, Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, Cambridge, 1965, orig. edn. 1935; Μ. M. Morozov, ‘The individualization of Shakespeare’s characters through imagery’, Shakespeare Survey, 2 (1949), 83–106; Leonard Prager, ‘The language of Shakespeare’s low characters: an introductory study’, diss. Yale, 1957; and more recently, A. R. Braunmuller, ‘Characterization through language in the early plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries’, presented at the congress of the International Shakespeare Association, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1981, and Elizabeth Yearling, ‘Language, theme and character in Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 121–30.
7 Wolfgang Clemen, ‘Shakespeare’s soliloquies,’ Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, London, 1972.
8 See, for example, Harold F. Brooks, ‘Two clowns in a comedy (to say nothing of the dog): Speed, Launce (and Crab) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Essays and Studies, 16 (1963), 91–100.
9 For a recent and stimulating discussion of character as process, see Michael Goldman’s ‘Characterizing Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 73–84.
10 Clemen, English Tragedy Before Shakespeare, trans. T. S. Dorsch, London, 1955, 12.
11 See William N. Dodd, ‘Metalanguage and character in drama’, Lingua e stile, 14 (1979), who observes that the ‘absence of an onstage fictive receiver gives prominence to the external receiver, the spectator’, (p. 147).
12 Dodd, cited above, argues that ‘what critics sometimes describe as “psychology” is actually … a semiological phenomenon, namely internal metalanguage’, (p. 145); see also Jirí Veltrusky’s discussion of character in Drama as Literature, Lisse, 1977.
13 Edouard Dujardin, one of the earliest practitioners of the interior monologue and certainly its earliest theoretician, pointedly links the device to drama. He dedicates his Monologue Interieur to Racine whom he regards as the supreme artist of the inner life because of his success at representing the subconscious. See also Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, New York, 1966, 180–5. Scholes and Kellogg distinguish between stream of consciousness, which they argue is organized on ‘psychologically oriented patterns’, and interior monologue, which uses dialogue and has traditionally ‘invited rhetorical display’. But Dorrit Cohn’s analysis of the formal elements of both stream of consciousness and interior monologue suggests that no clear distinction can be made between ‘psychologically oriented’ and rhetorically organized patterns; see Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, 1978, 90. See also Jan Mukar- ovský’s discussion of dialogue in The Word and Verbal Art, ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner, New Haven, 1977, esp. 81–115; Μ. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, 1981, 84–258; and L. S. Vygotsky’s work on the internalized thinking aloud of children, which suggests that dialogue may indeed be a feature of mental process, not simply a rhetorical means for representing it.
14 For a description of the essential aspects of dialogue, see Mukařovský The Word and Verbal Art, pp. 81–115; Bennison Gray, ‘From discourse to “dialog”,’ Journal of Pragmatics, 3 (1977), 283–97; and Udo Fries, ‘Topics and problems in “dialogue linguistics”’, Studia Anglica Posaniensia, 7 (1975), 7–15; I distinguish dialogue from conversation and its linguistic description in the work of Paul Grice, ‘Logic and conversation’, Syntax and Semantics, eds Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, New York, 1975, 111, 41–58.
15 The influence of the Psychomachia and its more flexible counterpart, the spiritual journey, should not be underestimated in any consideration of the inner debate in soliloquy as a strategy of character development; see Edgar T. Schell, On the imitation of life’s pilgrimage in The Castle of Perseverence’, Medieval English Drama, eds Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, Chicago, 1972, 279–91.
16 Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, London, 1974, 222.
17 See, for example, Harriett Hawkins, ‘The Devil’s party: virtues and vices in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 105–13.
18 See A. D. Nuttall’s brief discussion of the lifelike in Shakespeare in his ‘Realistic convention and conventional realism in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 33–7.
19 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Princeton, 1960, rpt 1972, 8.
1 The inward springs: Measure for Measure II, ii, 162–87
1 W. H. Auden, ‘The Globe’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, London, 1948, rpt 1962, 175.
2 If our theatrical experience does not convince us that Measure for Measure is a comedy, we should remember that it was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be revived during the Restoration. In his production (1661–2), Davenant suppressed a great deal of the play’s bawdry by combining Measure for Measure with the Beatrice and Benedick plot from Much Ado, a marriage which emphasizes the play’s comic features; see also Roger Sale’s ‘The comic mode of Measure for Measure Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968), 55–61.
3 References to Measure for Measure are to the Arden edition ed. J. W. Lever, London, 1965; rpt New York, 1967; for a review of the criticism of Angelo’s character, see Rosalind Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure, London, 1976.
4 See George H. Mead, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Merritt H. Moore, Chicago, 1936, rpt 1950, who defines thinking as ‘a process of conversation with one’s self when the individual takes the attitude of the other, especially when he takes the common attitude of the whole group’ (p. 380).
5 Roger Fowler’s account of the formal elements which construct the relationship among implied author, narrator and implied reader in ‘The referential code and narrative authority’, Language and Style, 3 (1977), 129–61, though limited to narrative, nevertheless is suggestive for drama as well.
6 Dorritt Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, 1978, 90.
7 See William Empson’s excellent essay, ‘Sense in Measure for Measure’ The Structure of Complex Words, London, 1951; for a summary of the glosses on these lines and Angelo’s soliloquy, see A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. Mark Eccles, New York, 1980, 95 ff.
8 Jan Mukarovsky, The Word and Verbal Art, ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner, New Haven, 1977, 60.
9 For a persuasive if sympathetic argument on behalf of Angelo’s character and his development, see W. Μ. T. Dodd’s ‘The character of Angelo in Measure for Measure’, Modern Language Review, 41 (1946), 246–55; Malheureux’s speech in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, first staged in 1604, though much less subtle, contains many of the same features – the broken rhythms and self-address – which we find in Angelo’s soliloquy. Miles, in The Problem of Measure for Measure, considers Malheureux almost the only contemporary character to resemble Angelo in plight and dramatic treatment, pp. 200–4.
10 For a more detailed account of the grammar school curriculum, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Urbana, 1944; Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare’s Use of Learning, San Marino, 1953, and Charles O. McDonald’s The Rhetoric of Tragedy, Amherst, 1966, 75–92, who discusses Tudor rhetorical training; see also his chapter on Seneca in which he notes the use of rhetorical questions and self-address in the tragic soliloquy, pp. 55–68.
11 Donald K. Clark documents the popularity of Aphthonius in ‘The rise and fall of Progymnasmata in sixteenth and seventeenth century grammar schools’, Speech Monographs, 19 (1952), 259–63; for a translation of the Greek original, see Raymond E. Nadeau’s ‘The Progymnasmata of Aphthonius in translation’, Speech Monographs, 19 (1952), 264–85.
12 Wesley Trimpi, ‘The ancient hypothesis of fiction: an essay on the origins of literary theory’, Traditio, 27 (1971), 12.
13 For an excellent discussion of place logic and its generative possibilities, see Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982.
14 E. H. Kantorowicz, ‘The sovereignty of the artist: a note on legal maxims and Renaissance theories of art’, Selected Studies, New York, 1965, 352–65; see also Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, ‘And doth the Lawyer lye …’, pp. 185–6.
15 My discussion of qualitas draws in part on Wesley Trimpi’s essay, ‘The quality of fiction: the rhetorical transmission of literary theory’, Traditio, 30 (1974), 1–118; see also Trousdale’s discussion of the role of ornament and its effect on reader and viewer in Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians, 81–94, and her final chapter on the didactic element in Renaissance drama, 114–59.
16 Trimpi, ‘Quality of fiction’, 12; Giorgio Melchiori has recently defined rhetoric as the ’art of creating consensus through linguistic communication and not simply (as is generally assumed) a classification of the forms of merely verbal expression into figures, tropes and schemata’, ‘The rhetoric of character construction: Othello’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 61–72.
17 See particularly M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Authority, truth and justice in Measure for Measure’ in Robert Ornstein, ed. Discussion of Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, Boston, 1961.
18 Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of the Mind, Berkeley, 1978.
2 Comic plot conventions in Measure for Measure
1 Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réeľ, Communications, 11 (1968), 84–9.
2 See Gregory Bateson, ‘Conventions of communication’, in Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, eds Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, New York, 1968, 212.
3 See, for example, Martin Price, ‘The other self: thoughts about character in the novel’, Imagined Worlds: Essays …in Honour of John Butt, ed. M. Mack, London, 1968, 279–99; Roland Barthes, S/Z, Paris, 1970; and Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, London, 1974.
4 In addition to the studies by Stevenson, Gless, Leonard and Miles cited below, see also Harriett Hawkins Likenesses of Truth and her article ‘The Devil’s party: virtues and vices in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 105–13 and Meredith Skura, ‘New interpretations for interpretation in Measure for Measure’, Boundaries, II (1980), 39–59.
5 For the notion of convention as contract and for a brief history of literary convention, see Harry Levin, ‘Notes on convention’, Perspectives of Criticism, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 20 (1960), 55–83.
6 See Darryl J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law and the Convent, Princeton, 1979, for scriptural parallels and a discussion of contemporary religious materials and their relevance to genre and character.
7 For a more detailed discussion of substitution in Measure for Measure, see Robert Ornstein, ‘The human comedy in Measure for Measure’, University of Kansas City Review, 24 (1957), 15–22, and more recently Nancy Leonard, ‘Substitution in Shakespeare’s problem comedies’, English Literary Renaissance, (1979), 281–301.
8 Ernest Schanzer points out the pun in Angelo’s name on the ten-shilling gold coin known as the angel in The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, London, 1963, 94.
9 The Duke’s role in the action has been much debated. Clifford Leech, ‘The meaning of Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, 3 (1950), 69–70, finds the Duke inconsistent and damnable; Harold S. Wilson, ‘Action and symbol in Measure for Measure and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 379 and Schanzer, Problem Plays, 113–17, both find the Duke’s actions defensible and necessary; Mary Lascelles, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Folcroft, Pa, 1953, gives the historical, literary and folklore background for the motif of the disguised ruler as justification for his role in the action. Recently Leonard Tenenhouse has pointed out that there were numerous ‘disguised ruler plays’ written and produced around the same time, ‘Representing power: Measure for Measure in its time’, Genre, 15 (1982), 139–56. Rosalind Miles surveys the critical problems traditionally associated with the Duke’s character in The Problem of Measure for Measure, London, 1976; for a cogent argument on behalf of the Duke and the play’s unity, see Louise Schleiner, ‘Providential improvisation in Measure for Measure, PM LA 97 (1982), 227–36. Richard A. Levin, ‘Duke Vincentio and Angelo: would “a feather turn the scale”?’ Studies in English Literature 22 (1982), argues that the Duke need not be explained in terms of convention, but rather as a character who succumbs to temptation.
10 Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources, London, 1957, rpt 1961, I, 8.
11 Lever, ed. Measure for Measure, 46, and J. V. Cunningham, ‘Essence in “The Phoenix and the Turtle”’, English Literary History, 19 (1952), 266.
12 Cf. chapter 1, p. 133, n. 7; in his introduction to the 1977 volume of English Institute Essays devoted to Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, Geoffrey Hartman notes that in contemporary psychoanalytic theory ‘the concept of identity in the ethical or psychological realm has been linked to the problem of reference in the linguistic realm’, p. xi.
14 Many critics have noted the similarity between Angelo and Isabella. See, for example, Schanzer, Problem Plays, p. 94, who compares Isabella’s Pharisaical view of divine law with Angelo’s view of man-made law. Schanzer argues that even Isabella’s forgiveness of Angelo at the end of the play is legalistic rather than personal, Christian forgiveness. D. L. Stevenson in his book, The Achievement of Measure for Measure, Ithaca, 1966, disputes this view. He claims ‘she is a kind of obverse of Angelo … the play is allowed to come to an end only at the moment of exact equivalence between Isabella and Angelo. It ends only when Isabella has really become the thing she argued for in Act II, that is, merciful (“against all sense,” as the Duke points out)’ (p. 44).
15 L. C. Knights’ ‘The ambiguity of Measure for Measure’, Scrutiny, 10 (1942), 222.
16 René Girard’s Violence et le Sacré, Paris, 1972, is suggestive and useful to an interpretation of Measure for Measure, particularly the final act. Girard argues that all desire is mimetic and therefore generates a crisis of difference between father and son, brother and brother, man and his neighbor. Such contention leads to reciprocal violence which can only be arrested by collective aggression against a surrogate victim. Only through such ritual violence, whether enacted by the community at large, as in primitive societies, or by its representative, as in the judicial system of modern culture, can such violence be contained, difference re-inscribed, and order maintained.
17 David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge, 1969, 19. For a concise introduction and bibliography on convention, see Lawrence Manley, Convention 1500–1750, Cambridge, 1980, 1–14.
18 In his discussion of Twelfth Night, Porter Williams argues generally that mistakes in identity are not superficial plot devices, but reveal subconscious patterns of human behaviour ‘Mistakes in Twelfth Night and their resolution: a study in some relationships of plot and theme,’ PMLA, 6 (1961), 193–9. For an interesting discussion of Shakespeare’s use of comic conventions including mistaken identity in the tragedies, see Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Princeton, 1980, and Robert R. Hellenga, ‘Elizabethan dramatic conventions and Elizabethan reality’, Renaissance Drama, 12 (1981), 27–49.
1 Bernard Knox, ‘The Tempest and comic tradition’, English Stage Comedy, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, English Institute Essays, 1954, New York, 1955, 52–73.
2 The Letters of Ausonius, trans. Ο. M. Dalton, Oxford, 1915, II, 24.
3 Stephen Gosson in his Plays Confuted, London, 1582, D5v, cites Amadis, Heliodorus’ Aethiopian History and the Arthurian tales as major sources for contemporary drama; Louis B. Wright documents the popular taste for romances in his Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England, Chapel Hill, 1935, chs 4, 11; for the influence of hellenistic romance in the Renaissance and on Shakespeare, see Samuel L. Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose, New York, 1912, and Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance, Lexington, Kentucky, 1970. Bernard Knox discusses the relation between Euripides and New Comedy, ‘Euripidean comedy’, The Rarer Action, eds Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, New Brunswick, NJ, 1970, 68–96; see also Sander M. Goldberg, The Making of Menander’s Comedy, Berkeley, 1980, and Madeleine Doran’s discussion of Renaissance habits of reading and illustrating Roman comedy as romance in Endeavors of Art, 3rd edn, 1954, rpt Madison, 1972, 174–5. There is evidence that this narrative mode of reading and illustrating derives from early fifth-century manuscripts of Terence: Leslie Webber Jones and C. R. Morey, The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence, Princeton, 1931, 205 ff.
4 For an interesting discussion of subtle variations in type characterization, see W. Thomas MacCary, ‘Menander’s characters: their names, roles and masks’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 101 (1970), 277–98.
5 Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, London, 1974, 126.
6 See E. Frankel, Plautinisches in Plautus, Berlin, 1922; M. Tierney, ‘Aristotle and Menander’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 43 (1936), 241–54; A. W. Gomme, ‘Menander’, Essays in Greek History and Literature, Oxford, 1937, 249–95; L. A. Post, From Homer to Menander: Forces in Greek Poetic Fiction, Berkeley, 1951, 233–4; F. H. Sandbach, Ancient Culture and Society: The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome, London, 1977, 102; and most recently Goldberg, The Making of Menander’s Comedy.
7 See R. Schottlaender, ‘Menanders Dyskolos und der Zusam- menbruch der “Autarkic”’, Schriften Akademie Berlin, 50 (1965), 33–42, cited in Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969, 105.
8 F. H. Sandbach and A. W. Gomme argue that though this device was sometimes used parodically in Old Comedy, there could ‘be no question of parody here; the scene which begins here has a colour less comic than that of any other part of the play’, Menander, A Commentary, Oxford 1973, 239–40; for general studies of the monologue in Menander, see Leo Freidrich, Der Monolog im Drama, Berlin 1908; John Dean Bickford, ‘Soliloquy in ancient comedy’, diss. Princeton, 1922, and John Blundell, Menander and the Monologue, Gottingen, 1980.
9 Menandri Reliquiae Selectae, ed. F. H. Sandbach, Oxford, 1972, rpt 1976, 712–32; translations by R. Goodwin.
10 ΕΠΙΤΡΕΠΟΝΤΕΣ, lines 894–9, Menandri Reliquiae Selectae.
11 ΕΠΙΤΡΕΠΟΝΤΕΣ, lines 908–32, Menandri Reliquiae Selectae; I have followed Wilamowitz and Korte, who make the Power speak from line 912, rather than Gomme and Sand- bach’s punctuation here.
12 David Bain, Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama, Oxford, 1977, 148.
13 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters, Soziologie, Dramaturgie, Gestaltung, 1967, trans. as Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, ed. Robert Schwarz, Baltimore, 1978, 9.
14 ΕΠΙΤΡΕΠΟΝΤΕΣ, 1. 912; Gomme and Sandbach, Menandri Reliquiae Selectae, p. 364.
15 E. W. Handley, ‘The conventions of the comic stage and their exploitation by Menander’, Μénandre, Genève, 1969, 21; see also Goldberg’s interesting discussion of Menander’s mixture of what he calls tragic and comic modes in The Making of Menander’s Comedy, pp. 29 ff.
16 Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, London, 1972, notes that Shakespeare uses all of the classical traditions of what Clemen terms apostrophe in finding imagined partners for his soliloquizing characters (p. 156); see also E. G. Turner, ‘The rhetoric of question and answer in Menander’, Drama and Mimesis, Themes in Drama, 2 (Cambridge, 1980), 1–24.
17 Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, pp. 8–9.
18 ibid., p. 9.
19 T. B. L. Webster, An Introduction to Menander, Manchester, 1974, 91.
20 Post, Greek Poetic Fiction, p. 316.
4 Plautus and Terence
1 Richard Hosley, ‘The formal influence of Plautus and Terence’, Elizabethan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 9 (1966), argues for the importance of Plautus over Terence in the Renaissance.
2 See, for example, Hazel E. Barnes, ‘The case of Sosia versus Sosia’, Classical Journal, 53 (1957–8), 19.
3 English translations are from The Rope and Other Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, New York, 1964, rpt 1977.
4 Jack Juggler, Malone Society Reprints, eds Benjamin Evans and W. W. Greg, 3rd edn, London, 1937.
5 See John Wright’s excellent essay ‘The transformations of Pseudolus’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 105 (1975).
6 All translations are from The Pot of Gold and Other Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, New York, 1977.
7 Commentum Terenti, Lipsiae, 1905, II, 184.
8 See Edwin W. Robbins, Dramatic Characterization in Printed Commentaries of Terence, 1473–1600, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 35 (4), 107 ff.
9 Evanthius, ‘De Fabula’ IV, 2, Commentum Terenti, I, 21.
10 Jodocus Badius Ascensius, Praenotamenta Ascensiana, 1502.
11 For the classic statement on types and decorum, see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, 3rd edn, 1954, rpt Madison, 1972, 218 ff.
12 G. B. Giraldi Cintio is one among many Renaissance critics who take up Donatus’ point about individualizing types; he cites contemporary plays such as Ariosto’s Cassaria as well as the standard Terentian examples. ‘Discorso … intorno al Comporre delle Comedie’, 1543, Discorsi, Venice, 1554, 214–15.
13 All references in Latin are to the Oxford Classical Text edition of Terence, eds Robert Kaner and Wallace M. Lindsay. English translations are from Frank O. Copley, The Comedies of Terence, Indianopolis, IN, 1976, 123.
14 See Robbins, Dramatic Characterization, who notes that though the courtesan is not made to suffer much ridicule at the hands of the dramatist, her generic evil is fully emphasized by the sixteenth-century commentators, p. 85.
5 The enchantments of Circe
1 See David Orr’s presentation of the statistical evidence in Italian Renaissance Drama in England before 1625, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, 40, Chapel Hill, 1970.
2 Albert Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, London, 1903, 225 ff. and Acts of Privy Council, II, 88.
3 Consider, for example, Marston’s knowledge of Italy in his words ‘To the Reader’ which precede The Malcontent, or the propensity of Elizabethan playwrights to Italianize their plays as in Romeo and Juliet, in which the Latin ending of Romeus’ name from Arthur Brooke’s poem becomes Romeo.
4 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, B5r, facsimile ed. rpt The English Experience, 523, Amsterdam, 1972.
5 Madeleine Doran, for example, in her Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, 1954, rpt Madison, 1972, considers Italian comedy as only a branch of Roman comedy.
6 G. K. Hunter, ‘Italian tragicomedy on the English stage’, Renaissance Drama, 6 (1973), 123–48.
7 See J. W. Lever’s introduction to the Arden edition of Measure for Measure, London, 1965, and Arthur Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, Charlottesville, Va, 1972.
8 L. G. Clubb, ‘Woman as Wonder, generic figure in Italian and Shakespearean comedy’, Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature, eds Dale B. J. Randall and G. W. Williams, Durham, NC, 1977, 109–32.
9 L. G. Clubb, ‘Italian comedy and the Comedy of Errors’, Comparative Literature, 19 (1967), 244–5.
10 Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, London, 1974, 222.
11 ibid., p. 217.
12 Salingar, ‘The design of Twelfth Night’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 122.
13 Italian dramatists took their heroines, young women who disguise themselves, suffer and finally win their beloveds, from medieval romance and novelle.
14 Quoted in Salingar, Traditions, p. 194; for Garzoni’s probable source, see Il Cortegiano, II, 11.
15 The Intronati, La commedia degl’Ingannati, ed. Florindo Cerreta, Firenze, Olschki, 1980, 151. All references are to this edition.
16 The Deceived, Five Italian Renaissance Comedies, ed. and trans. Bruce Penman, New York, 1978, 216. All references are to this edition.
17 In his discussion of inner speech in children, L. S. Vygotsky remarks upon three features, all characteristic of Lelia’s soliloquy: preservation of the predicate despite abbreviation; syntactic impoverishment; a corresponding semantic enrichment; Thought and Language, ed. and trans. Gertrude Vakar, Cambridge, 1962.
18 Penman’s choice of ‘lucky’ to translate ‘beato’ and ‘felice’ is unfortunate; ‘blessed’ and ‘happy’ would better communicate the force of Flamminio’s exclamation.
19 The Italian might be better translated, ‘Pardon me, if what I have done displeases you whom I didn’t know, because I am most repentant and realize my fault.’
20 Salingar calls it ‘the first modern comedy in which characters are shown to follow a credible purpose, see the consequences of their actions, waver, develop and change’, Traditions, p. 217.
21 In his ‘Politics and comedy in the early years of the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena’, Nerida Newbigin points out that Balía records suggest the play had been in preparation much longer, Il teatro italiano de Rinascimento, Milano, 1980, 131.
22 See Mario Baratto’s excellent discussion of Italian Renaissance comedy and society in La Commedia del Cinquecento, Vicenza, 1975.
23 Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica, Basel, 1576, 61, quoted in Salingar, Traditions, p. 185.
24 Salingar, ‘Design of Twelfth Night, p. 122.
25 Because Salingar limits his argument to I Suppositi, La Calan- dria, and Gl’Ingannati, all three written and performed before 1537, he misses the crucial relationship between late commedia grave and Shakespearean comedy. See Lever, ed. Measure for Measure; Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives; and Clubb, ‘Italian Comedy’.
26 See Guido Baldi, ‘Le commedie di Sforza Oddi e l’ideologia della controriforma’, Lettere Italiane, 23 (1971), 42–62.
27 Boccaccio’s tale of Gillette of Narbonne, III, 9, certainly a source for All’s Well that Ends Well, may also have provided a model for Bargagli’s Drusilla; see also Decameron, IV, 8, for another possible analogue.
28 In Borsellino’s collection, based on the 1606 and 1611 editions, Drusilla is a native of Lyon. The Fench setting reflects changes made after Bargagli’s death by his brother Scipione for the first production in 1589 at the marriage of Ferdinand de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine. The Gallic locale served to compliment the new French duchess.
29 Girolamo Bargagli, La Pellegrina, ed. Florindo Cerreta, Firenze, 1971, 86. All references are to this edition.
30 Drusilla’s refusal even of a kiss before a public betrothal reflects the stricter marriage laws which resulted from the Council of Trent.
31 See Baratto’s discussion of comic polarities, La Commedia del Cinquecento, pp. 72 ff.
32 Clubb, ‘Woman as Wonder’, pp. 109–32.
33 Salingar, ‘Design of Twelfth Night’, p. 222.
6 And all their minds transfigur‘d’: Shakespeare’s early comedies
1 Bernard Knox, ‘The Tempest and the ancient comic tradition’, English Institute Essays, 1954, 54.
2 Harry Levin, ‘Two comedies of errors’, Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, ed. B. W. Jackson, Toronto, 1964, 43.
3 All references are to the Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes, London, 1962, rpt 1969.
4 See particularly Harold Brooks, ‘Themes and structure in The Comedy of Errors’, Early Shakespeare, Shakespeare Institute Studies, eds J. R. Brown and Bernard Harris, London, 1961, rpt 1966, 55–72.
5 For the notion of ‘losing to find’ in Shakespearean comedy, see Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, London, 1974, 25, and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, London, 1974, 166.
6 G. K. Hunter’s John Lyly, the Humanist as Courtier, Cambridge, 1962, discusses Shakespearean metamorphosis which threatens our assured sense of personal identity. For the intellectual and literary history of this line in Errors, see T. W. Baldwin’s lengthy chapter in On the Compositional Genetics of the Comedy of Errors, Urbana, 1965.
7 Language of change and transformation pervades the play. See I, ii, 95 ff.; II, ii, 8, 168, 194–5; III, i, 34; III, ii, 29 ff., 142 ff.; IV, iii, 10–11, 38; V, i, 308 ff.
8 Coincidentally, it was Menander who, along with St Paul, established Ephesus’ reputation as a city of sorcery and cozenage.
9 The Oxford English Dictionary defines confound as ‘to defeat utterly, to spoil or corrupt; to throw into confusion of mind, feelings; to mix up or mingle so that elements become difficult to distinguish; and to mix up an idea, erroneously treat as identical’, all meanings which bear on Shakespeare’s use of the word here. There are examples from the period for all definitions.
10 See Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, London, 1938, rpt 1968, I, 78 ff. for an interesting discussion of Antipholus’ language. Words such as dote, siren, mermaid and the like seriously undermine a wholly positive interpretation of the twin’s love at this point.
11 For an interesting discussion of this issue in Shakespeare, see Robert Weimann, ‘Society and the individual in Shakespeare’s conception of character’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 23–31.
12 The text insists on union of the protagonist with a woman in marriage and therefore does not support W. Thomas Mac- Cary’s reading in ‘The Comedy of Errors: A different kind of comedy’, New Literary History, 9 (1978), in which he argues Errors is a narcissistic comedy in which Antipholus overcomes pre-Oedipal fears of his mother.
13 G. K. Hunter, Shakespeare: The Late Comedies, London, 1959, 17.
14 For a dissenting view, see Joan Stansbury, ‘Characterization of the young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 57–63.
15 Most readers agree with C. L. Barber who observes in his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Princeton, 1959, that ‘the comedy’s irony about love’s motives and choices expresses love’s power not as an attribute of personality but as an impersonal force beyond the persons concerned’, (p. 130).
16 See Harold F. Brooks’ commentary on Bottom’s soliloquy in the Arden edition, London, 1979, cxvii; all references are to this edition.
17 See Walter Cohen’s discussion of the clown’s function in his fine essay, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the possibilities of historical criticism’, ELH, 49, (1983), esp. 779–81, and Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, Baltimore, 1978, esp. 39–48, 120–50.
18 All references are to the Arden edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David, London, 1956, rpt 1965.
19 See Weimann, ‘Society and the individual’.
20 Clyomon and Clamydes, ed. Betty J. Littleton, The Hague, 1968, 109–10.
21 The Arden edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Clifford Leech, London, 1969.
22 H. J. Νeushäfer, Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle, München, 1969, 45, cited by Karlheinz Stierle, ‘L’histoire comme exemple, l’exemple comme histoire’, Ροétique, 10 (1972), 176–98.
7 Magic versus time: As You Like It and Twelfth Night
1 For a dissenting view see Thomas Kelly, ‘Shakespeare’s romantic heroes: Orlando reconsidered’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), who defends Orlando against the usual claim that he is tested and educated by Rosalind. Kelly argues that Orlando is as much a role-player as Rosalind herself, pp. 72 ff.
2 For the classic statements of As You Like It as a play of testing and education, see Helen Gardner, ‘As You Like It’, More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett, London, 1969, and Η. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy, London, 1966.
3 Critics have made only general remarks about Rosalind’s education or development, cf. David Young, The Heart’s Forest, New Haven, 1972, who observes that ‘her disguise is a means of revelation allowing her to avoid constraining roles’.
4 All references are the Arden edition of As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham, London, 1975.
5 D. J. Palmer in his essay ‘Art and nature in As You Like It’, Philological Quarterly, 49 (1970), 36, suggests that through the ‘almost operatic artifice of this quartet each finds his own image in Silvius’s idealized picture’. He also notes the formal rhetoric given to the reciprocity of the lovers’ plight.
6 See Albert R. Cirillo, ‘As You Like It: pastoralism gone awry’, English Literary History, 38 (1971), 19–39.
7 See, for example, Karen Greif, ‘Play and playing in Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 121–30.
8 All references are to the Arden edition of Twelfth Night, eds J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, London, 1975, rpt 1978.
9 I accept the First Folio reading of this line: ‘worne’, in the sense of ‘worn out, impaired by use, spent’, or even perhaps ‘hackneyed’, is perfectly in keeping with Orsino’s description of men’s fancies. The Second Folio reading, ‘won’, though arguably idiomatic, is after all an unnecessary and even elided emendation.
10 For an interesting discussion of Feste’s role in the action, see Alan S. Downer’s essay ‘Feste’s night’, College English, 13 (1952), 258–65.
11 For an interesting discussion of ‘mirroring’ in the comedies, see Jorg Hasler, Shakespeare’s Theatrical Notation: The Comedies, Berne, 1974.
12 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, London, 1957, 97. See also Clifford Leech’s critique from essentially the same perspective in ‘Twelfth Night or what delights you’, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Twelfth Night, ed. Walter N. King, Englewood Cliffs, 1968, 72.
13 Both Sidney and Jonson, as well as many lesser Renaissance theorists, base the analogy between the verbal and visual arts on the imitation of inner nature rather than outward appearance. See O. B. Hardison, English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, New York, 1963, for references from Jonson, pp. 274–5; Wilson, Action and Symbol, p. 69; Ascham, The Scholemaster, p. 61; and Puttenham, p. 175; for references in Sidney, see Geoffrey Shepherd’s edition, London, 1965, 51, 102, 107.
14 See Richard Henze, ‘Twelfth Night: free disposition on the sea of love’, Sewanee Review, 83 (1975), 267–83, for an interpretation of the play based on the oppositions of giving and taking, particularly Sebastian’s hazard of self.
15 Nancy K. Hayles, ‘Sexual disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1979), 63–73, distinguishes between sexual disguise which explores sexual role-playing, power and control (AYLI) and that which considers the metaphysical implications of disguise and appearance versus essence (TN).
16 Cf. Julian Markels, ‘Twelfth Night and King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 75–88, who claims that the steward’s ‘clarity of mind’ and ‘correctness of his philosophic manners’, and ‘his ability to participate suavely with the Fool in just the same sort of catechism by which we have already seen the fool mend Olivia’, prove that he has developed and learned from his errors.
8 Mistaking in Much Ado
1 J. R. Mulryne, Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing, Arnold Studies in English Literature, 16, London, 1965, 18.
2 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, London, 1969, 134; see also Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources, London, 1957, rpt 1961, I, 181, who claims that in IV–V, ‘theatrical intrigue takes the place of psychological profundity and great poetry’.
3 Jean Howard, ‘Measure for Measure and the restraints of convention’, Essays in Literature, 10, (1983), p. 148–58, see also George E. Rowe Jr’s introduction to Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition, Lincoln, 1979, in which he discusses how Renaissance playwrights, especially Middleton, question ‘the assumptions and values which underlie the form and conventions of New Comedy’, (p. 9).
4 Cf. E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition, London, 1949, 124; Charles T. Prouty, The Sources of Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Study, New Haven, 1950, 43; James Smith, ‘Much Ado About Nothing: notes from a book in progress’, Scrutiny, 13 (1963); and Walter N. King, ‘Much ado about something’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 150.
5 Though Claudio’s detractors have been more numerous than his supporters, see T. W. Craik, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Scrutiny, 19 (1953), 299, for a defense of his character.
6 All references are to the Arden edition, ed. A. R. Humphreys, London, 1981.
7 John Anson, ‘Dramatic convention in Shakespeare’s middle comedies’, diss. Berkeley, 1964, 151.
8 E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey, Oxford, 1925, p. 134; for the historical argument see Prouty, Sources, p. 46, and Nadine Page, ‘The public repudiation of Hero’, PMLA, 50 (1935), 743 ff.; J. K. Neill proposes perhaps the most audacious defense of Claudio in ‘More ado about Claudio: an acquittal for the slandered groom’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 (1952), 91–107.
9 Elliot Krieger points out Claudio’s ‘mechanistic refusal to question convention’, and does not see even his denunciation as exceptional in the presentation of the count’s character, ‘Social relations and the social order in Much Ado’, Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 49–61.
10 Jorg Hasler, Shakespeare’s Theatrical Notation: The Comedies, Bern, 1974, 70; his discussion of how Claudio changes in this scene is instructive.
11 Shakespeare also employs the rhetoric of consciousness in Leonato’s monologue in IV, i, 120 ff. The rhetorical questions, broken lines, and complicated syntax reveal the depth of his emotion. The reiteration of the first person possessive pronoun suggests the problematic nature of Leonato’s relationship with his daughter. Both he and Claudio seek to possess Hero; when her identity as chaste and dutiful daughter is jeopardized their respective identities as father and courtly lover are threatened as well. In the play world loss of maidenhead signals loss of identity.
12 Hasler, Shakespeare’s Theatrical Notation, p. 71.
13 See Anson’s discussion of Benedick’s relation to the Plautine miles, ‘Dramatic Convention’, p. 137.
14 M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, London, 1952, 187.
15 Hasler, Shakespeare’s Theatrical Notation, p. 72.
16 See R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, New York, 1965, 98–105.
17 See A. P. Rossiter’s discussion of the play in Angel with Horns, London, 1961, 74.
18 Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind, Berkeley, 1973.
19 See, for example, Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective, New York, 1965.
20 See particularly Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Princeton, 1979, 91 ff.; and more generally, Μ. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, 1981, 84–258.
9 Shakespeare’s rhetoric of consciousness
1 All references are to the Arden edition of Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, London, 1982.
2 Μ. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, 1981, 276.
3 Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet, Oxford, 1959, 157.
4 E. Cassirer, ‘The influence of language on the development of scientific thought’, Journal of Philosophy, 39 (1942), 309–27, quoted in Jacques Derrida, ‘The supplement of Copula: philosophy before linguistics’, Textual Strategies, ed. Josué Harari, Ithaca, 1979, 82–120.
5 Derrida, ‘Supplement of Copula’, p. 91.
6 See, for example, Pierre Aubenque, ‘Aristote et le langage, note annexe sur les catégοries d’Aristote. A propos d’un article de M. Beneveniste’, Annales de la faculté des lettres d’Aix, 43 (1965).
7 Derrida, ‘Supplement of Copula’, p. 91.
8 For an overview of theories of dramatic character, see Sanford Freedman, ‘Character in a coherent fiction: on putting King Lear back together again’, Philosophy and Literature, 7 (1983), 196–212.
9 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Ithaca, 1975, 29; see inter alia, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY, 1959; Clifford Geertz, Negara: the Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton, 1980; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brodie Schoepf, Garden City, NY, 1963.