The three comedies to be considered here (advancing Twelfth Night from its chronological place) have in common the characteristic Shakespearian balance of contrasted elements: high romance grounded by a lower love interest, malice tempered with forgiveness, a potentially dangerous situation created only to be dispelled by the triumph of love. They also share an atmosphere of gaiety and wit, for although the dramatic crises in each play produce a relatively intense effect in the theatre – the church scene in Much Ado, the villainy of Oliver in the early stages of As You Like It, Orsino’s violence at his supposed deception before the unravelling of Twelfth Night – indeed the impact of such moments is surprisingly intense considering that we generally know that they are based on a misunderstanding and that truth is about to appear; despite these serious dramatic moments the plays do not provoke any issues, moral or emotional, which by Shakespeare’s standards could be called serious. We have only to compare them with the three so-called ‘problem’ comedies, which are built on a similar pattern with similar ingredients but contain a much deeper exploration of human behaviour, to see that these first three mature comedies are gay and relatively innocent works. They are also, with the exception of the special case of Merry Wives, the three plays which have the greatest proportion of prose, a fact which indirectly confirms my point about their lightness, for the verse here is inferior both in quantity and excellence to the prose, but also to the verse of the serious comedies, largely, I feel, because Shakespeare has not given the verse any serious moral or emotional states to work on – if we think of the various powers of dramatic poetry in Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well, we realize what dimensions are missing here. Dramatic poetry is the extension of dramatic situation.
A further generalization might help to bring out the particular qualities of these three plays. Whereas in both groups of the mature comedies there is the conventional division of verse for the uppermost characters and plot, prose for the lower regions, in the three serious comedies the events and the very substance of language in the prose sections are designed to reinforce the plot and meaning of the main action – in these three gay comedies the plot or situation of the prose world may well have a significant relationship to the main action, but the language has virtually no connection. Thus whereas the comic deception of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado is (initially at least) a light-hearted parallel to the more serious deception in the main plot, the inevitable reflections on Appearance and Reality are almost entirely restricted to the verse scenes. Similarly in Twelfth Night the gulling of Malvolio is in a sense a more detailed exposure of affectation than that given to Orsino in the main action, but the prose scenes do not have any very important reflections on Fancy and Folly, say, though perhaps we can see them reflected in the waterdrop of Andrew Aguecheek. As You Like It is something of an exception in every respect, but does not alter the position in regard to the limitations of meaningful dramatic parallels. To put the generalization more succinctly, we are likely to find in the prose of these plays elements which will reflect the situation of the main action but not its ‘theme’. This distinction will become more apparent in the discussion of the serious comedies, and perhaps I should add that the twin aspects of these gay comedies which I take to be central to their existence are Love and Wit: the positive symbol of this dominant concern being Cupid, and the negative symbol – with perhaps an even greater number of references – being the cuckold’s horns, both images becoming the focus of a seemingly endless flow of Elizabethan wit. At a time when critics are straining themselves to find a serious significance for all the comedies, be it in thematic relationships, or in their presentation of a natural attitude to experience and fruition, or in some mysterious anthropological drama which seems to unite all peoples, all continents, and all ages of the world in a meaningful pattern, I think we should not blur the essential distinctions within Shakespearian Comedy. Here we have three plays which resolve obstacles to love and marriage and include endless felicities of Wit, but which are not serious dramatic works. To insist on their gaiety is not to devalue them in terms of plot-structure or language – indeed from the particular viewpoint of this study, in both aspects of Love and Wit prose plays an important and a skilful part.
Granted that Much Ado About Nothing is a play involving deception, both serious and comic, resulting in the eventual reassertion of truth and love, and that the whole action is accompanied by the most brilliant wit of this wittiest of dramatists, the problem is how to organize a discussion of the play which will attempt to analyse the way in which the resources of prose make a detailed contribution to the drama without the resulting discussion seeming flat-footed. For the last point, any critics’ arches are likely to seem fallen when he tries to elucidate Shakespeare’s wit, but that is an occupational hazard which must be faced, and to meet the first difficulty of overall organization it seems best to follow the development of the plot, which is quite complex and with many ironic juxtapositions. There is no single character whom we could profitably isolate, as with Falstaff or Henry V, nor would the selection for separate study of any one of the various prose devices be a helpful method: in this play the characters are more evenly developed and interact more significantly on each other than ever before, and similarly the devices are used together with considerable fluency – indeed the convergence of stylistic resources is one of the great achievements here. In the opening scene Shakespeare uses devices from all three main groups (imagery, linguistic structure, rhetorical structure) but at the lowest level, that of exposition, as the Messenger’s symmetries set up Claudio’s courage:
He hath borne himself beyond the promise
of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb,
the feats of a lion.
and the Messenger’s puns (more properly, the figure polyptoton, repetition of the same word root in different forms) adds to the point: ‘He hath indeed better bettered expectation than you must expect of me to tell you how.’ Lastly he is given a rather courtly image to report an uncle’s pride at Claudio’s bravery: ‘joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness’. In reply Leonato’s age is expressed in his sententious sentiments and in his rather formal speech, an effect created by the use of polyptoton, an image, and an antimetabole: ‘A kind overflow of kindness; there are no faces truer than those that are so washed. How much better is it to weep at joy, than to joy at weeping.’
The effect of these devices at this stage of the action is analogous to the suggestion made by Miss Mahood (p. 166) that there are proportionally more puns at the beginning of a play, as if to alert the audience to the sort of attention to verbal detail that will be required of them, and also to establish some of the issues involved. Here, in addition to these functions, this rather slow start also establishes a norm against which Beatrice’s wit stands out. She is at once made to single out Benedick, and immediately her wit is revealed, as is the positive love-symbol, Cupid:
He set up his bills here in Messina, and challenged Cupid at the flight, and my uncle’s fool reading the challenge subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the birdbolt.
Beatrice is now made to deflate the Messenger’s praise of Benedick, seizing on a rather ludicrous image and on a less substantial word-order:
MESSENGER. And a good soldier too, lady.
BEATRICE. And a good soldier to a lady, but what is he to a lord?
MESSENGER. A lord to a lord, a man to a man, stuffed with all honourable virtues.
BEATRICE. It is so indeed, he is no less than a stuffed man; but for the stuffing, well, we are all mortal.
(I, i, 54–60)
She is clearly a wit to be reckoned with, and Shakespeare well exploits that effect of repartee by which the witty replies are made to seem like improvisations. He also establishes the personal relationship between Beatrice and Benedick with some preparatory explicit comment from Leonato:
Faith niece you tax good Signior Benedick too much, but he’ll be meet with you, I doubt it not.… You must not, sir, mistake my niece; there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her, they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.
And having prefigured that relationship Shakespeare loses no time in developing it, for within fifty lines they are at blows.
The use of repartee in Much Ado is the most brilliant in Shakespeare, for nowhere are the combatants more equally matched than here, and nowhere is the verbal ingenuity so prolonged at such a high level. Henry IV might seem to offer a challenge, but there although Hal is certainly witty the battle was one-sided in that the real interest was to build up the pressure against Falstaff to focus on the moment of evasion, whereas here it is ‘the right fencing grace – tap for tap, and so part fair’. However the fencing is so brilliant as to almost resist criticism, for the point of the wit is seen at once by any moderately intelligent person, and a prose analysis of how it was achieved only repeats the effect in a duller way. Take the first words that they exchange:
BEATRICE. I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you.
BENEDICK. What my dear Lady Disdain. Are you yet living?
(I, i, 116–20)
Comment is not needed there, but as the bout becomes quicker and more elaborate, in addition to the normal outwitting tactics of simply being insulting or taking up an unpleasant and unintended second meaning, there is the more difficult trick of catching up metaphors and developing them as if by free association (and as it is more difficult, the more brilliant the characters seem):
BEATRICE. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.
BENEDICK. God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall ‘scape a predestinate scratched face.
BEATRICE. Scratching could not make it worse, an ‘twere such a face as yours were.
BENEDICK. Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
BEATRICE. A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
BENEDICK. I would my horse had the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way a God’s name, I have done.
BEATRICE. You always end with a jade’s trick; I know you of old.
The details of the twists are not really significant, the important effect of repartee is that each blow should seem the last: but from the resulting apparently crushed position a blow returns which succeeds in seeming crushing in return, only to attract automatically an equally destructive response. Shakespeare is of course playing a Punch and Judy show with his own wit, but the result seems perfectly in character.
For repartee is more than a linguistic device here: to Beatrice and Benedick it is a way of life, a mutual witty antagonism which has evidently long continued and seems destined to go on. But there are hints that behind it there was at one time a more friendly relationship, and although Shakespeare does not go to the detail of modern psychological theories of aggression as a disguise for concealed attraction, he does drop hints throughout the play that there was a time when they were closer (Benedick says of Hero that Beatrice ‘an she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in beauty, as the first of May doth the last of September’, and later Beatrice says of Benedick that he ‘once before’ won her heart ‘with false dice’). At all events they are united in their wit, and repartee is their natural mode of communication with the outside world. And just as Beatrice had triumphed over the messenger, now after their duet Benedick is given his solo, in which he easily outwits Claudio and later Don Pedro, with a string of witticisms both on Cupid and on ‘the horn’. Shakespeare here establishes the balancing detail to Beatrice’s distrust of men as Benedick proclaims himself ‘a professed tyrant to their sex’, and calls up another device, rhetorical structure, to show his wit as he passes judgment on Hero (also taking a second meaning for each epithet):
Why i’faith methinks she’s too low for a high praise,
too brown for a fair praise,
and too little for a great praise.
There is a faint touch of specious logic in the way that he automatically associates marriage with cuckoldry, saying of women that ‘Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none’, and he is given the role of the mocker of Romance (Speed, Moth, Hotspur, Mercutio) with this deflation of an emblem:
Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker’s pen, and hang me up at the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid.
Once Benedick’s destructive wit has departed, a characteristic change of media follows in that Claudio and Don Pedro are allowed to ascend to the dignity of verse and the reinstatement of Romance.
Shakespeare’s other main item of exposition is for the character Don John, who is distinguished as a villain by being not only a Bastard and a melancholy Malcontent but, by an extension which would have seemed inevitable to an Elizabethan, a brutal user of language. He is characterized with the help of a flexible use of all the devices available: his scorn is shown in his forceful alliteration (‘to apply a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief’), and his arrogant refusal to mould his behaviour to even quite petty demands of society is powerfully expressed in parallel structure.
| I cannot hide what I am; | I must |
| be sad when I have cause, | and smile at no man’s jests; |
| eat when I have stomach, | and wait for no man’s leisure; |
| sleep when I am drowsy, | and tend on no man’s business; |
| laugh when I am merry, | and claw no man in his humour. |
(I, iii, 11–19)
There the symmetry is more precise than ever, for to the normal vertical correspondence is added a horizontal one, as in each clause the first term, the verb, is the logical product of the second, the physical state, (‘sleep … drowsy’) while the third and fourth terms describe the opposite demands, which he refuses to consider. Thus the symmetries not only convey the necessary information about his character, but by their very rigidity show up his uncompromising egotism. We see this attitude again as Conrade advises him to be tactful to his brother Don Pedro, and dramatizes the advice with a rather formal image:
You have of late stood out against your brother, and he hath ta’en you newly into his grace, where it is impossible you should take true root, but by the fair weather that you make yourself. It is needful that you frame the season for your own harvest.
In his brutal reply Don John catches up the image and diseases it, and as he goes on to make a villain’s credo his images of himself as a fierce animal are given more force by the symmetrical structure with its uncompromising disjunctions:
I had rather be a canker in a hedge
than rose a in his grace,
and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all
than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any.
In this, though I cannot be said to be flattering honest man,
it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain.
I am trusted with a muzzle,
and enfranchised with a clog,
therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage.
If I had my mouth, I would bite.
If I had my liberty, I would do my liking.
In the mean time, let me be that I am,
and seek not to alter me.
The very formality of this structure sets him apart and the closeness of the patterning concentrates his ruthlessness still more. Shakespeare does not give him so much symmetry once his character is established but is (as ever) consistent in imagery, choosing malicious metaphors for him, either in a sinister form, as here to the news of an intended marriage: ‘Will it serve for any model to build mischief?’, or from a sinister source, increasingly that of disease: ‘Any bar, any cross, any impediment, will be medicinable to me, I am sick in displeasure to him’ (II, ii, 4–5), and again in this exchange as Borachio explains his plot:
DON JOHN. What life is in that, to be the death of this marriage?
BORACHIO. The poison of that lies in you to temper.
and, consistent to the last, in his final words to Claudio, having laid the plot, he describes the marriage as a ‘plague right well prevented’ (III, ii). Here perhaps is a connection between the language of the two layers of the play, for it is Don John’s poison that produces the ‘rotten orange’ in Claudio’s attitude to Hero.
Beatrice’s comment on Don John immediately after our first sight of him shows her perceptiveness in the form of a perfectly appropriate image: ‘How tartly that gentleman looks. I never can see him but I am heart-burned an hour after’ (II, i, 3–4). In the scene which follows her wit is demonstrated more fully, and her situation as a willing spinster is developed with the usual jokes on horns and ‘leading apes in hell’, and with the more particular prose devices of rhetorical structure (the flexibility of this device is shown by contrast with Don John’s use of it) and specious logic.1 For both Beatrice and Benedick, like Falstaff, a spurious use of logical processes is a way of evading the issue, and as with him the gaps in the logic are wide enough for us to see. So having given as one reason for not marrying: ‘Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face; I had rather lie in the woollen’, Leonato objects: ‘You may light on a husband that hath no beard’, and she at once unites logic and rhetoric to shrug off the point:
| He that hath a beard | is more than a youth; |
| and he that hath no beard | is less than a man; |
| and he that | is more than a youth, is not for me; |
| and he that | is less than a man, I am not for him. |
that is, to borrow a term from music, a sort of contrary motion, with two specious syllogisms moving away from each other and leaving Beatrice clear, the whole process sharpened by the rhetorical structure and the concluding antimetabole. When pressed again she has a still more sophistic argument, misusing the Christian metaphor of man as clay: she will not marry until ‘God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?’ This she caps with another sophism: ‘No uncle, I’ll none. Adam’s sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin, to match in my kindred,’ and she backs this up with another equivocation, twisting the word ‘measure’ from ‘moderation’ to ‘dance’, and developing the idea into a brilliant rhetorical set-piece (the clauses so marked should be read in the order a, b, c):
If the Prince be too important, tell him there is measure in every thing, and so dance out the answer. For hear me Hero;
The structure there was at the command of a skilful wit, setting up at first two clever parallels with matching symmetries, and then in the third category collapsing the whole pattern as a surprise-effect which also mimics the collapse in the meaning, an effect heightened by the puns (‘cinque’ – ‘sink’, ‘falls’). This brilliant use of rhetoric and logic (specious of course in that ‘repenting’ is tied as a reflex to the other states) sets Beatrice still further above the others and if it develops her wit it slows down the action, (although of course in an Elizabethan comedy the wit partly is the action), a static effect which looks forward to the many set-pieces in the form of a definition in As You like It.
But the image of dancing was at least appropriate in that they were waiting for a masked dance, during which Don John slanders Hero and deceives Claudio for the first time. Although Claudio reacts in the conventional manner, believing the slander and rising to an indignant verse-soliloquy, little is made of it and he seems to be reconciled to her at the end of the scene: therefore this first deception may be one of Shakespeare’s frequent ‘pre-echoes’, and his immediate reaction – ‘Farewell therefore Hero’ – may be intended to prepare us for his later violence. The most immediately significant effect of this masking-scene is to establish Beatrice’s dominance over Benedick, for he pretends not to be himself while she is then given some brilliant wit at his expense. Her superiority will be important for the ‘Kill Claudio’ scene and although he may seem the dominant character in terms of quantity – he has three prose soliloquies, she none – and in terms of the positive role he plays later in the unmasking of the intrigue and in the reproof of Claudio – as befits a man – her wit is definitely superior at this stage. (Incidentally, it is surely remarkable that the woman is more than a match for a man: there is no sign that Shakespeare is writing for a boy-actor, with the consequent limitations which some scholars propose.) We not only see Beatrice’s wit, but Benedick is made to recount at length more of the details and to show his intimidation:
She told me, not thinking I had been myself, that I was the Prince’s jester, that I was duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me. She speaks poniards, and every word stabs.
(It is always more impressive if a character is made to describe his discomfort out of his own mouth.) The apotheosis of Beatrice is completed when she now enters and Benedick is forced to leave, with an amusing series of impossibilities which he would perform ‘rather than hold three words’ conference with this harpy’, and her right hand is formally raised like a boxer’s. ‘You have put him down lady, you have put him down.’
This ends what might be called the straightforward part of the play: from here onwards Shakespeare begins to develop plots designed to reverse the two main situations, and later he crosses the threads of plot and character, creating a number of ironic juxtapositions. The movement begins at first in parallel, fulfilling our expectations: at the end of this scene (II, i) Don Pedro forms the plot which has been prefigured since the beginning (‘well, if ever thou dost fall from this faith, thou wilt prove a notable argument,’ I, i, 257), to bring Beatrice and Benedick ‘into a mountain of affection the one with the other’. But in the next scene (II, ii) we have a more sinister duplication, in that another plot to deceive is formulated, malicious not comic, in Borachio’s device to slander Hero. The comic plot gets under way in the following scene, and just as Beatrice was given a hint of her distrust of marriage in the first scene which she was allowed to develop fully later (II, i) so Benedick’s feelings on this topic are expanded here (II, iii). Further, the parallel deception scenes (Benedick: II, iii; Beatrice: III, i) are followed by repartee scenes in which each, now love-sick, is easily put down by friends who have hitherto been butts (Benedick: III, ii; Beatrice: III, iv) – this technique of separate development leading to a confrontation has been used for the deception of Caius and Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Later, however, the parallel lines become twisted, expectations deceived, a peripeteia which is the more effective following this block development, and the same prose devices (especially repartee) which have been developed so far – not quite statically, and although for characterization certainly in independence of any plot movement – now become adapted to a changed mood, and for a variety of dramatic purposes. As the subsequent analysis will make more clear, in this play Shakespeare not only sets up brilliant patterns of wit but then makes use of them for complex effects.
The process of ironic contrast begins with Benedick’s long soliloquy celebrating his independence (II, iii, 1–37), unaware of what is creeping up on him. But we know what is intended for him, although not what form it will take, and so we can savour the irony of his relaxed opening words: ‘I do much wonder, that one man seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviours to love, will after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love. And such a man is Claudio.’ But at the mention of the particular case he contrasts past and present behaviour in a patterned form which sharpens the flight from Mars to Venus:
I have known when there was no music with him but
the drum and the fife, and now he would rather hear
the tabor and the pipe. I have known when he would have
walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour, and now will
he lie ten nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet.
Now his scorn begins to mount in images: Claudio no longer speaks plain like a soldier but is now (like Armado) ‘turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes’; and like Falstaff Benedick mocks his own impossible alteration with a ludicrous image: until Love ‘have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool’. As he returns to himself he recalls his own confident indifference to women in a parallel structure which leads up to a specious piece of logic wrapped up in an antimetabole:
One woman is fair, yet I am well;
another is wise, yet I am well;
another virtuous, yet I am well.
But till all graces be in one woman,
one woman shall not come in my grace.
Elaborating the point Benedick begins to review the various graces he would require, and his voice is given a springy confident tone (which perfectly fits the sense) by the symmetries, with just enough variation to show his wit working:
| Rich she shall be, that’s certain; | ||
| wise, | or I’ll none; | |
| virtuous, | or I’ll never cheapen her; | |
| fair, | or I’ll never look on her; | |
| mild, | or come not near me; | |
| noble, | or not I for an angel; | |
| of good discourse, | ||
| an excellent musician | ||
| and her hair shall be of what colour it please God. | ||
The witty twist at the end confirms the absolute superiority which he feels at this moment, and the rhetorical structure here has neatly established the settled nature of his attitudes, just before they are to be shaken.
As the other nobles appear Benedick withdraws into the arbour like a hunted animal into its lair, and indeed Shakespeare now deliberately includes a number of trap-images to dramatize both the visual effect of Benedick in the arbour, and also his conceptual situation: ‘We’ll fit the hid-fox with a pennyworth’ (II, iii, 44). As the scene develops and the lords reveal how Beatrice is enamoured of Benedick, ‘whom she hath in all outward behaviours seemed ever to abhor’, the trap-images punctuate the action and remind us of the plot closing around Benedick:
| O ay, stalk on, stalk on, the fowl sits. | (95) |
| Bait the hook well, this fish will bite. | (113) |
| He hath ta’en th’ infection, hold it up! | (128) |
| Let there be the same net spread for her, and that must your daughter and her gentlewomen carry. | (221) |
The detail of the deception is beautifully managed, with just the sort of realistic prophecy of how Beatrice can be expected to behave before the plot catches her: she is reported to be constantly writing letters to declare her love to him, and then accusing herself of being ‘so immodest to write to one that she knew would flout her. I measure him, says she, by my own spirit, for I should flout him, if he writ to me, yea though I love him, I should … she will die if he woo her, rather than she will bate one breath of her accustomed crossness.’ We are left with another of Shakespeare’s anticipations of how a plot will turn out: ‘The sport will be, when they hold one an opinion of another’s dotage, and no such matter. That’s the scene that I would see, which will be merely a dumb-show.’ The theatrical image even promises a play within the play. Benedick now comes forward, totally gulled, and is given another soliloquy (230–53) to match the one which began the scene and to record his emotions at this stage, the balancing effect being also carried out into the language. At first he is reduced to a state of shocked innocence, given short, hesitant, breathless, unpatterned sentences to record a numbed condition, as he seems unable to think beyond the immediate moment:
This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady. It seems her affections have their full bent. Love me? Why it must be requited.
In that last sentence we have the first hint of false reasoning, which he improves on: ‘Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.’ – thus he accepts their criticism and takes it to its logical conclusion at one leap, although it inverts everything that he has previously held to. Now the reversal becomes more complete for him than he had made it for Claudio, as he reports their comments and actually lists the virtues in her which he had expounded in his previous soliloquy as being essential to the woman he would marry (‘wise, virtuous, fair’), a correspondence which is made clearer by him leaving for the first time the drooping, demoralized, unpatterned style:
They say the lady is fair, ‘tis a truth, I can bear them witness;
and virtuous, ‘tis so, I cannot reprove it;
and wise, but for loving me.
In this way the ‘Before: After’ effect is made still clearer, with a surprise reversal in the third term as he is made to use his wit against himself, like Berowne in a similar condition.
For the rest of the speech he is totally without the energy and confidence which had produced those springy symmetries in the matching soliloquy – structure, like wit, is put down. So too is logic, for again like Berowne he is now made to use specious arguments to bolster his position: he may have ‘some odd quirks and remnants of wit’ broken on him (splendid understatement) but
The comedy lies not only in the speciousness of the logic, but in its relation to what we alone have seen fully, Benedick’s previous confidence, and the neatly engineered deception. For whereas we have previously seen that Benedick does not want to marry, and have been amused by the specious way in which he used logic to avoid that issue, now we see that he does want to marry, and that the same tools serve his turn. With his usual excellent timing (although we must not take it for granted) Shakespeare at once exploits the situation he has set up by bringing on Beatrice for an immediate confrontation, and showing Benedick (Before: ‘May I be so converted, and see with these eyes?’) twisting all to the lover’s crazily subjective vision (After: ‘Here comes Beatrice. By this day, she’s a fair lady. I do spy some marks of love in her’). Beatrice makes no bones about her displeasure at having to deliver the message, but he completely misunderstands her (a situation briefly used for Slender and Anne Page, but how thinly in comparison) and not only does he not notice her insults (‘You take pleasure then in the message?’ – ‘Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife’s point, and choke a daw withal’), but now he turns inside-out the conventions of repartee which Shakespeare has so thoroughly established. For instead of taking an unflattering second meaning and returning it with addition, he takes an insolent surface meaning and then bends all his wits to discover a hidden compliment. The resulting contortions of tongue and reason are well shown in his last soliloquy:
Ha! ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.’ There’s a double meaning in that. ‘I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me’ – that’s as much as to say, any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks.
Thus the changes in Benedick’s psyche, from confident extrovert bachelor to shaken neurotic lover, have been admirably conveyed by the variations in his style, and for the first – but not the last – time Shakespeare puts an old device (here specious logic) into a new context, where its incongruity serves to clarify still more the emotional states being depicted.
The following scene shows Beatrice gulled, and although it is in verse notice must be taken of it, if only for the continuity of trap imagery. Indeed Shakespeare seems at great pains to develop the metaphor, as Hero says first:
For look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference.
and Ursula makes it still more explicit:
The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.
So angle we for Beatrice …
And as if that is not sufficient, Shakespeare makes Hero urge them to approach more closely so that Beatrice ‘lose nothing of the false-sweet bait’, and her first words, loud enough for the gull to hear, are that Beatrice is too disdainful:
I know her spirits are as coy and wild,
As haggards of the rock.
The explicitness of the image is possibly even excessive (although its fullness may be partly conditioned by the relative stiffness of the blank-verse line still), but it is appropriately summed up at the end of their plot:
URSULA. She’s limed I warrant you. We have caught her madam.
HERO. If it prove so then loving goes by haps. Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
And Beatrice vows to requite Benedick ‘Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand’. At least the consistency of the imagery shows how Shakespeare has applied it to the dramatic situation being enacted, a point sometimes overlooked in discussions of this play.2 A more adventurous stylistic device is the recollection, in verse and with Beatrice overhearing, of just the sort of witty evasions with which she has sidestepped all thoughts of marriage: whatever the praise given to a man,
she would spell him backward. If fair-faced,
She would swear the gentleman should be her sister;
If black, why Nature, drawing of an antic,
Made a foul blot; if tall, a lance ill headed;
If low, an agate very vilely cut;
And so on, with the irregular structure of the clauses successfully catching the effect of her prose. But an irony of which Hero is unaware follows, for she is made to promise to apply to Benedick a device which is about to be applied to her:
And truly I’ll devise some honest slanders,
To stain my cousin with. One doth not know
How much an ill word may empoison liking.
Stylistically, the crowning irony for Beatrice is that her soliloquy at the end of this scene declaring her love for Benedick is expressed not only in the clichés of love-language, but in verse and in rhyme, two quatrains and a couplet showing how Romance has triumphed over wit.
Here and elsewhere in Shakespeare wit is a sort of antidote to love, as we see again in the next scene, where the lovesick Benedick is easily put down by the characters over whom he had triumphed so convincingly before. The reversal is complete, for just as he had mocked Claudio and Don Pedro when they were trying to engage in a Romantic conversation earlier (I, i) now they do the same to him, with heavy irony: ‘He hath twice or thrice cut Cupid’s bow-string, and the little hangman dare not shoot at him.’ With this detail and others they turn his own weapons against him, such as his mock of the Romantic lover’s symptoms: ‘ ‘A brushes his hat a morning, what should that bode?’, an attack on his new love for fashion and appearances which is elevated into a whole speech using the symmetries of wit which he had previously mastered, ending with a fluent antimetabole:
Unless he have a fancy to this foolery,
as it appears he hath,
he is no fool for fancy,
as you would have it appear he is.
The crowning touch to this comic reversal is the use against Benedick of specious logic, as they sum up the whole list of symptoms with equivocation and a syllogism (Joseph, p. 176):
CLAUDIO. Nay but his jesting spirit, which is now crept into a lutestring, and now governed by stops.
DON PEDRO. Indeed, that tells a heavy tale for him. Conclude, conclude, he is in love.
And as he goes off to discuss terms with Leonato, we are again reminded of the much-awaited confrontation between the dupes: ‘Hero and Margaret have by this time played their parts with Beatrice, and then the two bears will not bite one another when they meet.’ But at just this moment of complete triumph for the courtiers, Shakespeare crosses the comic deception with the serious one, and there is a sharp change of mood as Don John lays his slander, backed up with the promise of demonstration at the window. Now the courtiers’ whole expectations are reversed, an antithetical development which Shakespeare brings out in their concluding speeches: if Claudio finds proof, ‘tomorrow, in the congregation, where I should wed her, there will I shame her’, and Don Pedro adds his loyalty; ‘And as I wooed for thee to obtain her, I will join thee to disgrace her.’ From now on the experience of the play might be described as ‘expectations deceived’, or as Don Pedro says ‘O day untowardly turned!’: the play begins to live up to its title.
At this point in the action, with a slanderous plot well under way, Shakespeare introduces the representatives of Justice, and any expectations we may have had of their efficiency are at once dispelled:
DOGBERRY. First, who think you the most desartless man to be constable?
FIRST WATCHMAN. Hugh Oatcake, sir, or George Seacoal, for they can write and read.
The first malapropisms are only a prelude, for in the topsy-turvy world of Dogberry words are likely to be invested with considerable confidence and force, although their value to the rest of mankind will seem quite opposite to that which Dogberry places on them. He is indeed Shakespeare’s most consistent malapropist (Joseph, p. 77) recalling Bottom with his hypallage: To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature,’ and that antithetical distortion is typical of his particular vice, that of using a word in the sense opposite to that meant (the figure acyron) which we last saw in Slender: ‘You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man.…’, a failing which he shows throughout, and which is put to its most amusing misuse in his praise of Verges, where his mistake destroys the whole point of the praise and suggests that the error is actually nearer the truth: ‘an old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt as God help I would desire they were’ (III, v). His indignation at the word ‘ass’ recalls the Hostess’ response to ‘swagger’, his pile of consolatory proverbs for Verges echoes other clowns in its banality: ‘A good old man, sir, he will be talking – as they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.… Well, God’s a good man; an two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind,’ while his apology for his good neighbour recalls Costard on Nathaniel – this collection of predecessors shows how rich the clown tradition is in Shakespeare, and how similar ingredients can be varied by him to produce different characters.
What is new about Dogberry is precisely the consistency of his inversion, an upside-down view of life in which all normal attributes are turned about and then given the same dignity and human value which they would normally have. Thus he explains the office of constable:
You shall comprehend all vagrom men, you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince’s name.
SECOND WATCH. How if ‘a will not stand?
DOGBERRY. Why then take no note of him, but let him go, and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.
This absolute inversion of office is nevertheless oddly justified by Dogberry’s virtuous manners, as in his later insistence that if they should meet a thief they should avoid him, ‘for they that touch pitch will be defiled’.3 So we are left with a Watch to guard over justice, one which seems dedicated to avoiding all contact with crime, and into this situation Shakespeare now introduces two real criminals, Borachio and Conrade, boasting of their deceit. The irony is that this anti-watch does make them stand, and does touch pitch – they apprehend the criminals, but they do not comprehend them, or barely. Here Shakespeare applies imagery in a new way, for whenever a character does not understand an image or takes it in a literal sense, it is a sure sign of their intellectual innocence (we have seen this law work briefly in Henry IV, both in the Chamberlain’s reaction to Gadshill’s images for thieves, and in Mistress Quickly taking Pistol’s ‘bullets’ and ‘Hiren’ quite literally). So Borachio, drunk and expansive, reveals to Conrade all the details of how Claudio was deceived about Hero; the watchmen hear this and ultimately transmit the fact to the authorities, but the dramatic irony is that what most arouses their suspicion and indignation is a quite innocent piece of imagery. The loquacious Borachio begins to philosophize, developing the contrast between appearance and reality, seen in the parallel between the rich villain employing a poorer one to do his dirty work and the ‘fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak’ being no guide to the nature of its wearer. Conrade fails to see the point, and cannot get beyond saying that ‘the fashion is the fashion’, Borachio urges the idea at him in another form, with an image – ‘Tush, I may as well say the fool’s the fool. But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?’ The Second Watchman is even more stupid than Conrade, and seizes on the personification:
I know that Deformed, ‘a has been a vile thief this seven year, ‘a goes up and down like a gentleman. I remember his name.
Borachio goes on to elucidate the image (and is explicitly reproved for his loquacity – another naturalistic comment), but it is too late: this ‘dangerous piece of lechery’ is apprehended, and the watchmen triumph: ‘And one Deformed is one of them; I know him, ‘a wears a lock.… You’ll be made bring Deformed forth I warrant you.’ Dogberry is totally convinced by their story and in retelling it gives it further allegorical detail as Deformed becomes a source of many of the evils in society (a small point is that he has misunderstood their meaning of ‘lock’, that is, a lock of hair, taking it in the other sense and then developing it ludicrously):
And also the watch heard them talk of one Deformed; they say he wears a key in his ear, and a lock hanging by it, and borrows money in God’s name, the which he hath used so long and never paid, that now men grow hard-hearted and will lend nothing for God’s sake. Pray you examine him upon that point.
(V, i)
So much hangs on one of the verbal misunderstandings which might at first have seemed a surface detail, produced by officers of what at first sight seemed an organization dedicated to the inversion of Justice, that Borachio’s comment on this irony – ‘What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light’ – could sum up the increasingly paradoxical movement of the play.
But although the plot has been uncovered for us, the news has not yet reached everyone, and we remember that Hero is ignorant of it, while Claudio and Don Pedro were convinced by it. Thus the following scene, in which Hero and her women mock Beatrice for being love-sick (as Benedick’s excuse had been a tooth-ache, so hers is a cold), although it is played with some gaiety by them – appropriately in their innocence – is muted for us by our awareness of the catastrophe approaching Hero: thus again an expected triumph is flawed. Beatrice is also put down by her own weapons being used against her, first the expression ‘heigh-ho for a husband’ (II, i, 332) is recalled and equated with ‘Horn’ (‘For the letter that begins them all, H’) and then her joke about the Messenger’s use of ‘stuffed’ (I, i, 59) is applied to her with a bawdy second meaning: ‘A maid and stuffed! There’s a goodly catching of cold’. The parallel with Benedick holds further: he, as the former mocker of love-symptoms, had those broken on him, while refusing to engage in repartee; she as the mistress of repartee must be outwitted by this means, and is soon reduced to asking defeatedly what the joke against her is. Margaret now triumphs, and Shakespeare gives her an inspired improvization on an Elizabethan cure-all: ‘Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart,’ and in denying that she intended any second meaning Margaret is given a dazzlingly quick piece of word-play, rather like that with which Romeo triumphed over Mercutio:
Moral? No by my troth I have no moral meaning, I meant plain holy-thistle. You may think perchance that I think you are in love. Nay by’r lady I am not such a fool to think what I list, nor I list not to think what I can, nor indeed I cannot think, if I would think my heart out of thinking, that you are in love, or that you will be in love, or that you can be in love.
The brilliance of Shakespeare’s rhetoric there shows again how love unbalances wit: Beatrice has lost all her weapons.
If our expectations are somewhat thwarted in this scene they are played on even more in that following, for the wedding has not yet taken place, and here we find Dogberry and Verges, potentially in full possession of the truth about the slander, actually face to face with Leonato: so if only they can produce a clear story the whole situation could be saved. But Shakespeare wants the Church scene to take place because several developments in the characters depend upon it, and although he could easily have withheld the two constables until after that scene without our noticing, he prefers to bring them on here and make one of his wittiest applications of a given characteristic to a new situation. Dogberry’s wonderful gentleness and humanity comes out again in his quite touching apologies for Verges, who seems to break decorum by blurting out the story before his superior is ready for it: ‘Marry, sir, our watch to-night, excepting your worship’s presence, ha’ ta’en a couple of as arrant knaves as any in Messina.’ To which Dogberry (perhaps also excusing ‘excepting’) gives a long, repetitive, and seemingly endless reply, concluding: ‘An honest soul i’ faith, sir, by my troth he is, as ever broke bread. But God is to be worshipped, all men are not alike. Alas good neighbour.’ Meanwhile Leonato, who has to hurry off to his daughter’s wedding, is seething with impatience and is given half-a-dozen of the briefest sentences: ‘Neighbours, you are tedious’ – ‘I would fain know what you have to say,’ while our tension rises: will the truth come out? But Dogberry cannot be brought to the point and Leonato leaves without learning the facts which would annul the apparent tragedy which is about to take place. Again Shakespeare has applied a well-established stylistic detail to a situation where its effect on the characters and the audience is quite discordant, and thus the development of Dogberry the defeater of any clarity in language, logic, or intellect has been an organic part of the drama, and the delay and frustration which was often a by-product of the obstreperousness of the clowns in the early comedy is now a totally natural extension of character.
In the church scene all the expectations of the characters on stage are completely deceived, and although we are detached by our superior knowledge we must sympathize with the intensity of the emotions shown by Claudio and Leonato, approve the plan of Friar Francis, and admire the perception of Benedick who is allowed to see right through the plot, discussing the princes:
Two of them have the very bent of honour,
And if their wisdoms be misled in this,
The practice of it lives in John the bastard,
Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies.
A measure of the intensity of this scene and the way that Shakespeare’s gay characters are now reacting with real feeling is that when the others have gone Benedick discovers Beatrice in tears: ‘have you wept all this while?’ – ‘Yea, and I will weep a while longer.’ Her pathos and sympathy are a new development, and Shakespeare here achieves his most brilliant reversal of expectations coupled with a re-application of a stylistic device: for many scenes now we have been confidently looking forward to the fruition of the comic trap, when the two gulled lovers finally confront each other, a scene which will be ‘merely a dumbshow’ between two tame bears. In fact, coming as it does after the fruition of the serious trap it is played in an almost tragic context, and instead of laughter produces some wit, but mainly a sympathetic response from us to the way that they are reacting so finely to what they think has happened. It is a curiously mixed mood, reversing all our anticipations, and Shakespeare exploits it wonderfully. Their attitude is now serious, and as Benedick takes up Beatrice’s hint – ‘Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right her’ she backs away from him quibbling all the time, until he is made to protest his love, but now without laughter:
I do love nothing in the world so well as you, is not that strange?
But she continues to defeat his direct advances with repartee, and so his frustration grows, and for the first time he refuses to take up her quibbles and return them with ironic addition, now not allowing himself to be deflected from his purpose:
BENEDICK. By my sword Beatrice, thou lovest me.
BEATRICE. Do not swear, and eat it.
BENEDICK. I will swear by it that you love me, and I will make him eat it that says I love you not.
BEATRICE. Will you not eat your word?
BENEDICK. With no sauce than can be devised to it. I protest I love thee.
(IV, i, 275–82)
Now sure that she can rely on him Beatrice finally admits ‘I love you with so much of my heart, that none is left to protest’, and triumphantly he offers: ‘Come bid me do any thing for thee.’ Having finally caught him she clarifies the hint dropped twenty-five lines previously: ‘Kill Claudio’; and although he first recoils, her increasing passion (here the ‘fury’ described earlier is now shown in her great sympathetic, angry speeches) finally brings him to agree. I do not suggest that Beatrice’s manipulation of him is specious or insincere, but that she has wanted to make sure of him before demanding proof of his love in this immediate context. Thus Shakespeare has managed to create a credible situation, in which such an extreme favour can legitimately be demanded, by applying their basic relationship of repartee to a finely gradated sequence in which Benedick’s first piece of non-ironic conversation is the hole which Beatrice can enlarge.
Continuing the contrast of serious and comic moods which rules throughout the later stages of this play Shakespeare now presents Dogberry presiding over the taking of evidence, and persisting in his ironic inversions: ‘Write down, Prince John a villain. Why this is flat perjury, to call a Prince’s brother villain! But part of Shakespeare’s excellence as a dramatist is his refusal to rely on cardboard figures to prosecute the lower levels of the action: here he has created Dogberry with all his absurdities and he lets him have his say, consistent to the last. The new grit in Dogberry’s mouth is the insult of Conrade that he is an ass, and although the joke is on him as he confuses writing down such names with repeating them, and so mocks himself, (‘O that I had been writ down an ass!’) the real pearl which this grit produces is the speech in which Dogberry is made to defend his whole life from this charge. Here the repetitions give the speech a sort of structure, and help to bring out his rather ridiculous citizen vanity, but totally without ridicule – Shakespeare celebrating the eccentric is as humane as ever.
No thou villain, thou art full of piety as shall be
proved upon thee by good witness.
I am a wise fellow, and which is more,
an officer, and which is more,
a householder, and which is more,
as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina,
and one that knows the law, go to,
and a rich fellow enough, go to;
and a fellow that hath had losses,
and one that hath two gowns,
and every thing handsome about him.
What a respectable bourgeois world is revealed there! Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. In his final appearance (V, i) Dogberry is as touching as ever, and the incongruity of his disordered wit being given rhetorical structure is repeated when he finally comes to report the crime to Don Pedro. Here the framework which he sets up is comic precisely because he is unable to keep to it, and we see again (as with Launce and Gobbo earlier) Shakespeare’s use of verbal order to show up a clown’s mental disorder, an exposure which is at its sharpest here. Shakespeare has either asked himself, or subconsciously answered, the question ‘how would such a self-dignified public servant as Dogberry retail this vital information?’, and he solves it with perfect consistency. Dogberry, aware of his momentous task, and ambitious of playing the orator, decides to present the case by using a partitio, by which one divides the topic up into various heads, and goes still further on this by numbering the parts (the figure eutrepismus, Joseph, p. 114): thus any mistake is exposed on the sharpest grid:
Marry sir, they have committed false report.
Moreover they have spoken untruths:
Secondarily, they are slanders.
Sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady.
Thirdly, they have verified unjust things,
and to conclude, they are lying knaves.
This alone is a hilarious misuse of rhetoric, but Shakespeare excels it by making Don Pedro conform to the usual rhetorician’s courtesy (throughout the play the noblemen treat Dogberry as humanely as Shakespeare does) of answering under the heads proposed by the first speaker:4
First I ask thee what they have done.
Thirdly I ask thee what’s their offence.
| Sixth and lastly | why they are committed, |
| and to conclude | what you lay to their charge. |
The wit is more amusing as the details listed by Dogberry on the right-hand side are virtually all saying the same thing, and in the reply the tautologies are made more obvious. Claudio’s comment is the perfectly apt one in rhetoric: ‘Rightly reasoned, and in his own division’, but more telling is the persistence of frustration at Dogberry’s defeat of order, seen in Don Pedro’s direct appeal to the prisoners to reveal why they have been charged: ‘This learned constable is too cunning to be understood.’ And with real Shakespearian consistency of style and attitude, Dogberry maintains his triumph over the English language to the end, together with his unshakeable dignity: ‘God keep your worship. I wish your worship well, God restore you to health, I humbly give you leave to depart, and if a merry meeting may be wished, God prohibit it.’
That stylistic consistency and the ability to exploit it to new dramatic purposes is seen again in the scene before Dogberry’s final arrival, where Don Pedro and Claudio have first faced in verse the anger of old Antonio and Leonato, with their pathetic but embarrassing threats of a challenge (V, i, 1–110). Now Benedick succeeds them on stage, and also in situation, for as we know but they do not, he comes to offer a very real challenge. They welcome him as usual as the provider of wit, a high Fool: ‘We have been up and down to seek thee, for we are high-proof melancholy, and would fain have it beaten away,’ but their expectations are to be deceived, and the ironic split between them begins now:
CLAUDIO. Wilt thou use thy wit?
BENEDICK. It is in my scabbard – shall I draw it?
DON PEDRO. Dost thou wear thy wit by thy side?
The irony is that although we know that Benedick is being literal, he seems to them to be describing wit in the same imagery that has been constant for all the ‘skirmishes of wit’ earlier (‘She speaks poniards, and every word stabs’), and they each pun on ‘draw’ in this sense without realizing how earnest he is. Benedick finally takes Claudio aside and delivers the challenge, but Claudio tries to laugh it off, answering Don Pedro’s enquiry ‘What, a feast, a feast?’ with more quibbles: ‘He hath bid me to a calf’s head and a capon; the which if I do not carve most curiously, say my knife’s naught.’ The split mood continues, as Don Pedro, who has not heard the challenge, attempts a longer jest:
I’ll tell thee how Beatrice praised thy wit the other day. I said thou hadst a fine wit. True says she, a fine little one. No said I, a great wit. Right says she, a great gross one. Nay said I, a good wit. Just said she, it hurts nobody.
– and so on, in the way that Beatrice was made to overhear a similar account of her equivocation. But the irony here is double, for in addition to the (unknown) hopelessness of trying to cheer Benedick up, Don Pedro is using the old abusive repartee, unaware that Beatrice and Benedick have outgrown it: thus the stylistic joke is not only unsuitable but obsolete, for ‘the date is out of such prolixity’. Their mockery of Benedick’s boasts of bachelor-dom, again turning his weapons against him – ‘But when shall we set the savage bull’s horns on the sensible Benedick’s head’ – also comes unstuck, and he leaves them with an image which seems to deliberately catch up the ‘battle of wits’ metaphor and deflate it: ‘I will leave you now to your gossip-like humour. You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which God be thanked hurt not.’
Although Shakespeare successfully joins comic and serious moods in the closing stages of the play, it must not be thought that earnestness dominates, for we know that the clouds are about to clear. So in the scene after the truth finally reaches Leonato, we find Benedick, Beatrice and Margaret, and although they are not yet aware of the exposure, we are, and so Shakespeare can begin working up the comedy again. If Benedick is not witty enough to prevent Margaret putting him down in some bawdy repartee, he is given something of his former wit back for his soliloquy on Romance and rhyming, where he is once again the mocker of Romantic love (‘Troilus the first employer of pandars’ – although he now claims that his love is greater than ‘a whole book full of these quondam carpet-mongers’), and is again given some insolent symmetries:
I can find out no rhyme to lady but baby –
an innocent rhyme; for scorn horn –
a hard rhyme; for school fool –
a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings.
Beatrice now appears, and we perceive that she too is her former self when she is impatient for news of Benedick’s challenge:
BENEDICK. Only foul words – and thereupon I will kiss thee.
BEATRICE. Foul words is but foul wind,
and foul wind is but foul breath,
and foul breath is noisome,
therefore I will depart unkissed.
That specious syllogism recalls Falstaffs devaluation of honour, and Benedick’s comment could be retrospectively applied to him too: ‘Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit.’ So by the small details of their style we witness their return to something of their former state, although now they are united, and the following repartee is good humoured for once. But even on this point our expectations seem about to be deceived when, in the last scene, they are made to confront each other and the truth about their deception finally comes out; despite the other people’s reports, now neither will admit to loving the other ‘more than reason’, and their repartee seems about to part them when they are discovered to have written sonnets to each other. Their final capitulation is suitably witty:
BENEDICK. Come, I will have thee, but by this light I take thee for pity.
BEATRICE. I would not deny you, but by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told, you were in a consumption.
BENEDICK. Peace, I will stop your mouth.
The last loose end of the play’s wit is tied up as Don Pedro can finally mock: ‘How dost thou, Benedick the married man?’ and consistent to the last, Shakespeare makes Benedick shrug it off, as he had promised he would, but with a final specious piece of logic:
In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me, for what I have said against it. For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.
The pun on ‘conclusion’, being at once the end of the syllogism and the end of Benedick’s freedom, is a perfectly appropriate witticism within the clearly defined conventions of this play, and it is only right that Benedick’s increasing dominance of the action should be recognised in that he is allowed to overrule Leonato and have the dance before the wedding: ‘Strike up pipers.’
Throughout Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare demonstrates a remarkable ability to unify all the elements of his comedy: Plot and Wit, instead of being rivals, are at one. There is great artistry in the way he individualizes characters and their relationships in terms of style, and still more in his use of the norms and expectations thus set up to convey distinct changes within characters’ emotional states. Most brilliant of all – and this is what makes Much Ado the most organic of his witty comedies – is his skill in making the action of the play stem directly from some of these stylistic elements (most notably the Watch’s accidental discovery of the crime, and Dogberry’s imperturbable delaying of its revelation), and in making the revival of old styles in a new context change the whole dramatic mood of the play. Compared to this double dramatic process of not only establishing witty uses of prose but then applying them to the development of the plot, As You Like It, in which he is content merely to produce ever more brilliant pieces of prose, is bound to seem static. It is a play in which Plot has been almost forgotten in the cause of Wit. There is little of the economy of means and superbly integrated structure of Much Ado, little of the subtlety in translating characters and styles from one mood or situation to another in which their effect can set up a significant contrast. In terms of plot, although we do not look to Shakespearian Comedy for cause-and-effect developments, or complete three-dimensional consistency nevertheless the casualness with which he manages the dénouements of As You Like It points not only to a very sophisticated use of dramatic conventions and a pastoral setting, but also to a diminished interest in dramatic situation: once the rather laborious exposition has landed everyone in the forest the action slows down, and the various deceptions here (Rosalind of Orlando, Rosalind of Phebe) are clearly at a much slighter level than before. The mood of the play, after Oliver’s initial malice and ingratitude, is one of barely disturbed happiness, with none of the tensions and split effects of Much Ado. The nature of the prose of As You Like It supports the general point that the play is static rather than dynamic, for no other play contains as many witty set-speeches (even the comic confrontations result not in developments of the plot nor in insights into character but in still more set-speeches), and in no other play are logic and rhetoric used so brilliantly, albeit as static solo performances.
In such an account As You Like It obviously suffers from the proximity of Much Ado, for it is a very different play. Some reasons can be found for the difference in structure (I do not suggest that Shakespeare has lost interest in plot, but his attention definitely seems elsewhere): one might argue that as this is a pastoral play and that as ‘there are no clocks in the forest’, then time must be shown to stand still, only enlivened by wit. But that seems a weak argument, as does that which assigns the static situation to the presence of Touchstone, the first Court Fool, who would be expected to be a brilliant solo performer in the play as he would be in real life: this is true, but Shakespeare had no need to include a Fool unless he wanted to present his wit. Some critics would shift this argument back a stage and refer it to the conditions of Shakespeare’s theatrical environment, arguing that the difference between Touchstone and Dogberry is accounted for by Shakesspeare having written the earlier part for the cruder clown Will Kemp and the later for the more sophisticated Robert Armin. This argument falls into the trap of supposing that Shakespeare was directly influenced by his actors, an assumption often made but on little evidence: where do we see the signs that his tragic heroes were all written for Burbage, or that his women—who cover the whole range of realistically conceived female experience, from Juliet to Cleopatra, from Mistress Quickly to Cressida – were created for sexless boys to act? Such arguments neglect the evidence of the plays, and also the internal necessities of each plot: a bumbling type clown would be as out of place in the world of As You Like It as would a sophisticated mocker on Dogberry’s Watch. And a year or so after creating Touchstone Shakespeare is writing a part for the gravedigger in Hamlet which definitely demands the cruder type. Could Armin not have played Bottom when A Midsummer Night’s Dream was revived? We need to know much more about Elizabethan dramatic companies and the disposition of roles, but until we do we must beware of type-casting Shakespeare. Touchstone is needed, I think, for his wit.
More light on the very different structure of As You Like It can be gained from considering the plot. Here Shakespeare revives a device used in the early comedies up to Love’s Labour’s Lost, that of using parallel structure, but not allowing the levels to cross, as in Much Ado: we are back in the Lyly-like separation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as G. K. Hunter has shown (pp. 342–3; although he goes on to argue that the separation is transcended). Thus Shakespeare duplicates the love-interest in the gentility of the main plot with a ludicrous romance amongst the clownish servants, but in addition to balancing Rosalind and Orlando with Touchstone and Audrey, he goes a stage further by adding a middle layer in the ridiculous shepherd-couple, Silvius and Phebe. Thus although Touchstone is not necessary to the action in the way that Dogberry is, or even the multiple agents in The Merry Wives, he does have a Shakespearian role as the ironic reflector of Romance (a satiric attitude to Love which is increased by the presence of Jaques), and the tying-together of the marriage at the end brings him rather closer to the fabric of society. But nevertheless at almost every appearance, even in the marriage-scene, Touchstone is given dazzling displays of wit which set him apart from everybody else, so that we return to his wit as being the main reason for his presence. The other character who stands apart from the play is Rosalind, though her position is increasingly that of the puppet-master who controls the action. She is also isolated by her superior wit, Orlando never being allowed to approach her in this, and although she too seems to be integrated into society, at the end she steps out of it again, in theatrical and in personal terms, to deliver the wittiest of Epilogues. But by considering her place in the plot a better explanation can be found for her isolation than could be discovered for Touchstone’s. There is none of the relative equality in wit and repartee between Rosalind and Orlando such as there may be in the other love-comedies, for the simple reason that up to the very end of the play Orlando does not know that the youth with whom he has been having such one-sided dialogues is in fact Rosalind. But somehow they must be together for love to grow (we see its effect directly on Rosalind, by implication on him), and thus, as with Henry V wooing Katharine, one partner must produce all the wit. Her speeches are not in fact as unrelated as they may seem, but given this naturally ‘solo’ situation her part has to be as dazzling and entertaining as possible. If we concede that Rosalind’s wit is partly determined by the dramatic structure of the play, and if we abandon the attempt to discover by which processes Shakespeare formed As You Like It, we are nevertheless left with a play in which the combined effect of the isolation-by-superiority of both Touchstone and Rosalind produces the most brilliant display of witty prose in the canon.
The result of this long preamble is partly to prepare the reader for the absence of any attempt to trace the development of prose-styles here in relation to character and situation, and partly to suggest that we should sit back and enjoy the performances in the spirit of witty display in which they were written. After the fluent but undistinguished prose of the opening expository scene Rosalind and Celia seem all the more witty by their dialogue on Nature and Fortune with its infinitely complex riddling (I, ii, 35–59) and by their effortless mock of Le Beau (97–132) with its deflating images: ‘Here comes Monsieur Le Beau’ – ‘With his mouth full of news’ – ‘Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young’ – ‘Then shall we be news-crammed’ – ‘All the better. We shall be the more marketable.’ They are not exactly given repartee the one against the other, but a joint performance against a third party, and at this stage Rosalind is wit-whole (as a generalization of the norm, it can be said that repartee in this play, although it is a sign of wit, is less germane to plot and character than before, and thus any exceptions will be important). Touchstone is introduced at once as a logician with a brilliant piece of sophistry illustrating ‘the fallacy of ignorance of the elench’, as Sister Joseph has shown (indeed her elucidations of the logic and rhetoric used in this play should be required reading5). Even without knowing the technicalities, the effect of his sophism on ‘the knight that swore by his honour they were good pancakes’, in the theatre as on the page, is to outwit us – the words move and twist quicker than the mind. However even Touchstone is outclassed by Celia’s revision of his antimetabole on wit and folly – as she says earlier, ‘always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits’. But Rosalind’s superiority is short-lived, for as she immediately falls in love with Orlando her wit suffers the same eclipse by romantic affection which had attacked Beatrice and Benedick, and the next time we see her, any gifts she may have had in repartee are quite gone:
CELIA. Why cousin, why Rosalind; Cupid have mercy, not a word?
ROSALIND. Not one to throw at a dog.
CELIA. No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon curs; throw some of them at me; come lame me with reasons.
ROSALIND. Then there were two cousins laid up, when the one should be lamed with reasons, and the other mad without any.
Repartee here shows the absoluteness of her condition, and the way that in Shakespeare the fallen wit’s weapons are always turned against them is seen in her collapse into ‘the fallacy of consequent’ (the assumption that a proposition is convertible simply when it is not, Joseph, p. 198):
CELIA. Is it possible, on such a sudden, you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son?
ROSALIND. The Duke my father loved his father dearly.
CELIA. Doth it therefore ensue that you should love his son dearly?
Small points both, but to Shakespeare and so to his audience, the tiniest verbal equivocations are significant.
The malice of Duke Frederick in expelling Rosalind is expressed in verse, as is the pathos and sympathy with which the two girls decide to disguise and flee together (I, iii), and a similar choice of the more noble and sympathetic medium for characters who have hitherto been given prose is followed for the matching scene where Orlando and old Adam also decide to flee (II, iii). But once in the forest of Arden all are given prose except for occasional promotions to dignity (Orlando begging protection for Adam, II, vii, and writing poetry to Rosalind, III, ii; she and Celia when involved in more romantic, less mocking situations, III, v and IV, iii). Once there, the characteristic elements of the play soon appear, as Touchstone moves from equivocation to a splendid parody of Silvius’ recital of the ‘Actions most ridiculous’ to which the lover is drawn:
I remember when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile, and I remember the kissing of her batlet, and the cow’s dugs that her pretty chopped hands had milked. And I remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her. … We that are true lovers run into strange capers;
but as all is mortal in nature,
so is all nature in love
mortal in folly.
(II, iv, 46–58)
That is the first of many juxtapositions of the sublime-ridiculous and the ridiculous-ridiculous aspects of love. But although Touchstone is allowed to mock Rosalind slightly here, henceforth his deflating wit is kept well away from the heroine, for any mockery of love in her presence must be performed by her, and when he intrudes later he is sharply reproved – ‘Out fool’ (III, ii, 104) and his only refuge is with the unlearned (perhaps it is for this reason that Shakespeare expels him, for his wit shines best in that context). The other mocker is now introduced, and Jaques is at once characterized, both by his melancholy and by the witty sarcasm of his images: ‘More, I prithee more. I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’… ‘that they call compliment is like th’encounter of two dog-apes’.
But if Jaques deflates with his images, Touchstone makes people look foolish by arguing with them, and he is given a scene with each of the three country folk and puts them down in turn. Touchstone’s use of logic is not that of the less intelligent Shakespearian clown, whose confusion is more glaringly (and amusingly) exposed by his misuse of it, but obviously that of the wit who manipulates logic with a speciousness which we are meant to see. Unlike Falstaff his misuse of logic is not directed to any particular ends beyond that of outwitting the opponent, and thus its static nature is more apparent, and this effect is increased still more by Shakespeare’s decision not to individualize any of the yokels through their style, thus making the polarity between wit and comic butt still sharper. The only sign of personality in the country folk beyond their simple diction and attitudes is that Corin, when challenged to reveal his philosophy, produces the random roll-call of proverbs and commonplace observations which marks other of Shakespeare’s simpletons:
I know the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends. That the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn. That good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun.
(III, ii)
He is indeed a ‘natural philosopher’, and Touchstone easily makes rings round him, but although the triumphs are always witty, and although it is amusingly incongruous to see the Fool applying such devices as the fallacy of secundum quid, Cacosistaton, and the disjunctive syllogism to put down rustics, one wishes that Touchstone had better opposition: at least Feste meets Viola.
It is perhaps ungrateful to complain of this imbalance when Touchstone is so obviously the master of rhetoric as well as logic, as we see when he answers Corin’s question “how like you this shepherd’s life?” with a remarkable series of paired, symmetrical, antithetical, and finally tautological clauses:
In itself, of course, that speech is a virtuoso piece of prose, and never fails to arouse laughter. Now he moves from rhetoric to logic, and asks Corin: ‘Wast ever in court, shepherd?’ – ‘No truly’ – ‘Then art thou damned,’ and explains his deduction (again based on the fallacy of consequent):
Why, if thou never wast at court, thou never saw’st good manners; if thou never saw’st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked, and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state shepherd.
In reply Corin does not seize on the fallacies in the argument (such as the shift of meaning on ‘good’), as the educated spectator might do, but is made to take up the question in practical terms: courtly behaviour would be impracticable in the country, especially kissing hands. Touchstone is made to argue down the point with what Sister Joseph calls a ‘sprightly parody of inadequate induction or argument from example’ (p. 142). But it is important to notice the dramatic effect of the exchange, for although decorum demands that Touchstone should triumph in logic, the arguments which he makes in fact serve to deflate courtiers: their hands sweat too, he says, ‘And is not the grease of a mutton as wholesome as the sweat of a man?’ When Corin (who is at least given the spirit to argue back), protests that countrymen’s hands are often defiled with tar, whereas those of courtiers are ‘perfumed with civet’ Touchstone responds with a violence that seems unaware of the self-mockery which it contains:
Learn of the wise and perpend. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat.
If so, then the more fools the courtiers, as Corin’s defeated answer might imply: ‘You have too courtly a wit for me, I’ll rest’. In addition to laughing at Touchstone there (for if he is unaware of the satire then it is more amusing), our sympathies certainly move to Corin now as he makes another defensive confession of faith, but this time with dignity:
Sir, I am a true labourer; I earn that I eat; get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness: glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride, is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.
That seems quite admirable until Touchstone partially demolishes his position, mocking the incongruity of offering ‘to get your living by the copulation of cattle’. Never was the dispute between Cloth Breeches and Velvet Breeches more witty, or more double-edged.
After this amusing but rather static exchange Shakespeare develops the situation in the uppermost plot with speed and wit. The two women discover Orlando’s verses, and although the first set is bad enough for Touchstone to mock (again Shakespeare shows his considerable stylistic empathy in creating an original style and then parodying it in a mode appropriate to the mocker), the second is more accomplished, and rightly so if we are to retain some respect for Rosalind (‘Nature presently distilled / Helen’s cheek, but not her heart; / Cleopatra’s majesty; / Atalanta’s better part; / Sad Lucretia’s modesty’). Left alone, as Celia begins to reveal to Rosalind that Orlando is also in the forest and the author of these verses, one stylistic device is well applied to Rosalind’s developing excitement and that is repartee. There is a mixture of satire and affection in the way Celia deliberately postpones telling Rosalind how she discovered Orlando, and the heroine’s increasing suspense is shown in her extravagant images: ‘I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour this concealed man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle – either too much at once, or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth, that I may drink thy tidings,’ and in the rush of her questions: ‘What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me?… Answer me in one word.’ Celia’s replies mock Rosalind at each stage with the approved methods of repartee, but they are not sufficient to stop her in her career, as we see best in the way she interrupts the final revelation:
CELIA. But take a taste of my finding him, and relish it with good observance. I found him under a tree like a dropped acorn.
ROSALIND. It may well be called Jove’s tree, when it drops such fruit.
CELIA. Give me audience, good madam.
Rosalind. Proceed.
CELIA. There lay he stretched along like a wounded knight.
ROSALIND. Though it be pity to see such a sight, it well becomes the ground.
CELIA. Cry holla to the tongue, I prithee; it curvets unseasonably.
Here repartee is skilfully used in terms of character, as Shakespeare sets up the relationship between Rosalind’s infatuation (seeking to gloss over any indignity) and Celia’s corrective wit (deliberately minimizing the issue) which he will recall later.
Rosalind steps aside to hear Orlando admit his love to Jaques only to be mocked for it, and then the situation which Shakespeare has been working up to for the first half of the play is finally set in motion, as Rosalind defines her role to Celia: ‘I will speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him.’ She begins by taking up his ‘There’s no clock in the forest’ with an aggressive wit: ‘Then there is no true lover in the forest’ (throughout she mockingly tests his love) ‘else sighing every minute, and groaning every hour, would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock,’ but he does not respond saucily, indeed quite tamely: ‘And why not the swift foot of Time?’. As the dialogue develops it is as if Rosalind has assumed a Fool’s habit, for Orlando is reduced to the level of a ‘feed’; his successive speeches being designed simply to prompt her next reply: ‘Who ambles Time withal?’ and so on through that riddle, ‘Can you remember any of the principal evils that he laid to the charge of women?’… ‘I prithee recount some of them’ … ‘I pray you tell me your remedy’ … ‘What were his marks?’ … ‘Did you ever cure any so?’. Orlando is thus reduced to the minimum presence of a Katharine to Henry V, Nerissa to Portia, Armado to Moth, Antipholus to Dromio, and although we realize the structural necessity of the device, it is perhaps too much to make him retain his troubled, incomprehending, passive role for three whole scenes (III, ii; IV, i; V, ii). He is in danger of seeming too much of an innocent, although we have seen his resource earlier. At least we can concentrate more on Rosalind’s wit now, as she embarks on the first of many brilliant set speeches. Although the plot develops through the action elsewhere and not through these speeches, I must at least come to Shakespeare’s defence on behalf of the function of these solos in the theatre, for as she anatomizes love (with sufficient mockery to dispel infatuation) she gradually circles closer and closer to her own situation, and for an audience constantly aware of the basic irony there is the pleasure (added to that of the wit itself) of seeing her move within this deception to play her own part, get right to the actual truth, to the declaration of love, to a form of marriage even, without his realizing it. Given this naturally solo situation Shakespeare can exercise to the full his amazing fertility of wit, and whatever the form or content of Rosalind’s speech her eloquence always holds the attention charmed.
Until she meets Orlando in the forest Rosalind’s syntax is mainly that of the unpatterned norm of conversation, but as soon as she puts on the disguise of wit the most complex patterns are used to express it, and the sheer quantity of this witty rhetorical prose makes it impossible to quote it all (but by now the reader will have the tools with which to judge for himself). Of the parts answering the riddle ‘who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal’, the wittiest is the second: he ambles
With a priest that lacks Latin,
and a rich man that hath not the gout.
For the one sleeps easily because he cannot study,
and the other lives merrily, because he feels no pain:
the one lacking the burthen of lean and wasteful
learning;
the other knowing no burthen of heavy tedious
penury.
These Time ambles withal.
The wit is shown not only in the structure, of course, but in the way that that modifies the contents of the speech, setting up an insidious suggestion of a connection between the two, especially in the double irony of the ‘burthen’ which they are spared. Rosalind’s attitude to Orlando is mocking, as we see in her images: ‘Where dwell you pretty youth?’ – ‘With this shepherdess my sister; here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat’ (this is also an example of the figure syllepsis, with the double-meaning on ‘skirts’). But in mocking women (their faults were ‘all like one another as half-pence are, every one fault seeming monstrous, till his fellow-fault came to match it’) she mocks herself, and in mocking love she mocks herself still more, as Celia and the audience know. Thus we are given some perspectives which give an added meaning to the most brilliant of all Shakespeare’s catalogues of the ‘marks’ of love:
| A lean cheek | which you have not; |
| a blue eye and sunken, | which you have not; |
| an unquestionable spirit, | which you have not; |
| a beard neglected, | which you have not – |
and to avoid the sing-song effect of earlier catalogues (such as those by Speed and Moth) Shakespeare stops the list from becoming predictable by inserting a parenthetical sentence – ‘but I pardon you for that, for simply your having in beard is a younger brother’s revenue’ – and when she takes it up again it is in a different rhythm:
then your hose should be ungartered,
| your bonnet | unhanded, |
| your sleeve | unbuttoned, |
| your shoe | untied, |
and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation.
The alternation of symmetrical with non-patterned elements is cleverly done, for she drops the patterns here only to return to them at the end for an antithesis which probes his genuineness: ‘you are rather point-devise in your accoutrements, as loving yourself, than seeming the lover of any other’.
Shakespeare makes Rosalind alternate the longer speeches with shorter exchanges where she moves closer to her own situation. So there is considerable irony for her, and for us, in her explanation why lovers are not punished like madmen as they should be, because ‘the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too’. Shakespeare is establishing another of his ‘mirrors within mirrors’ situations here, and her next and longest speech so far (III, ii, 427–45) is still more relevant to her condition in being a satire on the changeableness of woman. The play which she wants Orlando to help her to put on is a love-cure by the direct method: ‘I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote, and woo me,’ and as she sets up the persona of the inconstant mistress the mockery of ‘La donna e mobile’ is heard: to play this part one would have to
grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing, and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything …
Here the effect of fluctuation has been achieved by the random piling together of particular terms; now the variability is suggested by antithetical structure, culminating in a complex variation on antimetabole:
would now like him, now loathe him;
then entertain him, then forswear him;
now weep for him, then spit at him;
that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love
to a living humour of madness.
And in addition to parodying woman, the speech also reminds us of the (by this definition) unnatural constancy of Rosalind’s own behaviour. She also mocks Orlando, and so all lovers, and so herself too, in terms of the Elizabethan concept of the seat of love (as Orsino says, ‘liver, brain, and heart. These sovereign thrones’): ‘And thus I cured him, and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.’
The effect of this deflating imagery is to distance the relationship, to keep Orlando (and Romance) at arm’s length. This non-involvement is aided by the presence and attitude of Celia, through whom Shakespeare adds a further layer of coolness by making her deflate Rosalind’s images whenever she privately admits her love, and drops entirely the wit which belonged to her mockery in the part of Ganymede. Thus the next time that we see them together (III, iv) they are alone and Rosalind’s infatuation is shown by the waterlogging of her wit:
ROSALIND. Never talk to me, I will weep.
CELIA. Do I prithee, but yet have the grace to consider that tears do not become a man.
Now the inconstancy of woman which she has only just mocked (‘Now like him, now loathe him’), begins to drive her too, and Celia cleverly keeps pace with her, swinging from positive to negative and amplifying each part:
ROSALIND. His very hair is of the dissembling colour.
CELIA. Something browner than Judas’s; marry his kisses are Judas’s own children.
ROSALIND. I’faith his hair is of a good colour.
CELIA. An excellent colour; your chestnut was ever the only colour.
The wittiest moment follows, for as Rosalind settles on trust with a dreamy (and blasphemous) image Celia parodies it with three ridiculous ‘religious’ images in apparent agreement, only for Rosalind (like Falstaff at a similar stage of infatuation, the second time that Hal mocks his extravagant similes) not to notice it:
ROSALIND. And his kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread.
CELIA. He hath bought a pair of cast lips of Diana. A nun of winter’s sisterhood kisses not more religiously, the very ice of chastity is in them.
ROSALIND. But why did he swear he would come this morning, and comes not?
Again the failure to perceive that you are being mocked is a sign of the eclipse of wit, and in their next scene together Rosalind is still further in: ‘O coz, coz, coz. My pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love. But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal.’ Puncturing this affected image is not to be resisted: ‘Or rather bottomless, that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out.’ Rosalind notices the mockery this time but turns the blame on Cupid, going off ‘to find a shadow and sigh’ till Orlando come, and again Celia pricks the romantic bubble: ‘And I’ll sleep.’ Celia hardly speaks in prose again, partly because her turn for romance has come (in his love plots Shakespeare consistently uses the topos of the biter bit) and she falls in love with a reclaimed Oliver, but also because her role of preserving wit from its enemy Romance is complete.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a parallel love-affair is developing, between Touchstone and Audrey. If it duplicates the upper plot in this, it echoes it still more in that wit again plays the major part. And just as the application of repartee and mocking imagery to Rosalind’s situation was – despite the norm of non-exploitation – an exceptional creative re-application of a stylistic device to a new context, so another such juxtaposition is made here. Touchstone woos Audrey at first with his normal specious logic, and the situation is sharpened by having Jaques in hiding to comment on the process: ‘O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house.’ The Fool’s logic uses an erudite device to argue against the desirability of honesty in Audrey to a quite inverted end, and although we may feel that his wit is its normal self here, as he later meditates on the inevitable Shakespearian association of horns and marriage he is given a self-dialogue which shows up his confusion (in the same way that earlier analogues had exposed Launce, Gobbo, Berowne, and Falstaff), starting from a patently false premiss:
But what though? Couragel As horns are odious,
they are necessary.
It is said, many a man knows no end of his goods;
right. Many a man has good horns, and knows no end
of them.
After that gruesome application of the proverb Touchstone speciously shifts the blame on to the wife, and then puts the guilt on all men, in a ventriloquist’s dialogue6, which I will set out by roles:
TOUCHSTONE: MASTER. Well, that is the dowry of his wife, ‘tis none of his own getting.
PUPIL. Horns?
MASTER. Even so.
PUPIL. Poor men alone?
MASTER. No, no; the noblest deer has them as huge as the rascal.
PUPIL. Is the single man therefore blessed?
MASTER. No, as a walled town is more worthier than a village,
so is the forehead of a married man more honourable
than the bare brow of a bachelor.
That last argument was the most specious yet, but one still more specious is to come, also put into symmetrical form to clarify its weaknesses:
And by how much defence is better than no skill,
by so much is a horn more precious than to want.
We deny your major, and your minor, and your conclusion, for the confusion of the logic there and the fact that Touchstone uses it (like Falstaff) to put down a non-existent opponent, are both signs of another triumph of more personal demands over the neutral objective vision of wit.
When Jaques steps forward to give Audrey away in a mock marriage which prefigures that between Orlando and Rosalind conducted by Celia (VI, i), Touchstone’s confusion is shown again, first in the short nervous phrases of his embarrassed welcome: ‘How do you sir; you are very well met. God ‘ild you for your last company; I am very glad to see you; even a toy in hand here sir,’ and then in the way rhetorical patterning shows up the ludicrous-ness of his defensive examples:
That last image is a grotesque application of the animal analogy to a human context, but the final blow which destroys the situation comes from Jaques, with the most brilliant of all his sarcastic images:
Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is; this fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot; then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and like green timber, warp, warp.
Jaques belongs more to the verse world of the play, but like many Elizabethan satirists he can deliver his barbs in both media, and later (IV, i) he is given a set-speech to develop his fixation with melancholy and to mock love, boasting that he has neither
the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation;
| nor the musician’s, | which is fantastical; |
| nor the courtier’s, | which is proud; |
| nor the soldier’s, | which is ambitious; |
| nor the lawyer’s, | which is politic; |
| nor the lady’s, | which is nice; |
| nor the lover’s | which is all these |
but a brand of his own making, concocted on his travels. The predictable nature of those symmetries is perhaps a sign of Jaques’ vanity, for his pretensions as a traveller are rudely deflated as soon as he has left.
The second scene between Rosalind and Orlando comes closer still to her condition: ‘Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent,’ and she is given some witty repartee to lead him on, testing his reactions: ‘Well, in her person, I say I will not have you’ – ‘Then in mine own person, I die’ – ‘No faith, die by attorney.’ As she develops this point into the wittiest of all Shakespeare’s mocks of the eponymous heroes of Romance, we find a sudden departure from the norm, for whereas all of Rosalind’s longer speeches in the part of Ganymede are given complex rhetorical structure, for this attack the symmetries are laid aside, and to anyone familiar with the stylistic. conventions of her speech the resulting manner will seem confidently casual in a way that suits exactly this offhand destruction of the mystique:
The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies; men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
(IV, i, 96–106)
There the disarming frankness of her manner is considerably increased by the simplicity of the prose (only slightly pointed for the conclusion) – both form and content undermine any objections by their very smoothness. But later in the scene, after the mock marriage, Rosalind returns to her normal witty symmetries to set up new categories of mockery:
No, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo,
December when they wed.
Maids are May when they are maids,
but the sky changes when they are wives.
and she goes on in still sharper patterns comparing the newly-wed wife’s inconstancy and jealousy to various grotesque animals. Throughout her part as Ganymede all her ironies are double-edged.
Touchstone has one more rustic conquest to make, over William, his rival for Audrey, and we share his delight at the coming fray: ‘It is meat and drink to me to see a clown. By my troth, we that have good wits have much to answer for. We shall be flouting. We cannot hold.’ Having paid homage to the philosophical bases of clowning (‘the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool’) Touchstone exercises his logic first, trapping William with a disjunctive syllogism (as Sister Joseph explains, one ‘having for its major premise a disjunctive proposition expressing alternatives, one of which the minor premise affirms or denies, while the conclusion in consequence affirms or denies the other’, p. 186): here it is at work, filled out in Shakespeare’s vein of deliberate inconsequentiality:
TOUCHSTONE. Art thou learned?
WILLIAM. No, sir.
TOUCHSTONE. Then learn this of me. To have, is to have. For it is a figure in rhetoric, that drink being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other. For all your writers do consent that ipse is he. Now you are not ipse, for I am he.
TOUCHSTONE. He, sir, that must marry this woman.
The relationship between logic and rhetoric, classical and Renaissance writers taught, was similar to that in the human hand between the fist and the palm: one tight, condensed, the other open, expository. But as Touchstone moves from logic to using his rhetoric on William (with ‘annotations’ like Nathaniel’s, appropriate when addressing the unlearned) it resembles less the explanatory gesture of the palm than the striking force of the fist:
Therefore, you clown, abandon –
which is in the vulgar leave – the society –
which in the boorish is company – of this female –
which in the common is woman.
Which together is, abandon the society of this female,
or, clown thou perishest;
or, to thy better understanding, diest;
or, to wit, I kill thee,
make thee away,
translate thy life into death,
thy liberty into bondage.
I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel.
I will bandy with thee in faction,
I will o’er-run thee with policy.
I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways,
therefore tremble and depart.
(V, i, 51–64)
Never was anyone more terrified by rhetoric – in the words of Grumio describing Petruchio, ‘an he begin once, he’ll rail in his rhetricks … an she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face, and so disfigure her with it.… (Shrew, I, ii). After this crushing attack, and with a sure sense of stylistic contrast, Shakespeare makes William answer Audrey’s injunction to leave (‘Do, good William’) with the briefest, least comprehending reply possible: ‘God rest you merry sir.’
That brilliant display by the solo rhetorician of the lower plot is now answered by one from his counterpart above stairs, as Rosalind shows her greatest wit in the last scene before the marriage (V, ii). As it opens Orlando is questioning Oliver about his sudden love for Celia, a development from one moment to the next which is aptly expressed in the ‘climbing figure’, gradatio:
Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her? That, but seeing, you should love her? And loving woo? And wooing she should grant?
Here the figure is perhaps deliberately expressed in a rough form, for when Rosalind appears she first comments on the match with a mocking image and with the Latin tag that Shakespeare has previously used (Armado, Falstaff) for mock-military dispatch: ‘There was never anything so sudden, but the fight of two rams, and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of I came, saw, and overcame,’ but then she is given a brilliant refinement on the figure (the more brilliant as we have seen Orlando’s just competent version of it):
For your brother, and my sister,
| no sooner met, | but they looked; |
| no sooner looked, | but they loved; |
| no sooner loved, | but they sighed; |
| no sooner sighed, | but they asked one another the reason; |
no sooner knew the reason, but they sought the remedy.
And in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage,
which they will climb incontinent,
or else be incontinent before marriage;
There Shakespeare demonstrates that he is the greatest of rhetoricians, as he first finds a rhetorical figure which sums up the dramatic situation and the speed of their love (and by its clever development focusses our attention more on the figure and less on the possible improbability of the speed), then organizes it skilfully on the page, then finds an image which describes the figure (‘these degrees’), and finally translates it back into the experience of the lovers by making them ‘climb’ the intangible ‘pair of stairs’ which the step-like motion of his figure has created, before returning to earth and a bawdy release on the final antimetabole. I do not know of a more skilful use of a rhetorical figure anywhere, certainly none with the added overtones of describing a dramatic situation and also expressing the wit of an individual character.
In the final stages Rosalind and Touchstone continue to dominate the play. A sensitive change of style is made as she explains her device to Orlando, for the obscure language and extremely involved syntax of this long speech is designed to mystify him, only issuing out into clarity with the instructions for the morrow. She controls the ludicrous quartet of lovers with her final term which will change all (‘And I for no woman’), and in her disguise her images mock love to the last: ‘Pray you no more of this, ‘tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.’ In her final speech she shares out her attentions with appropriate symmetry, and the rhetorical structure echoes the symmetries in the plot:
I will marry you, if ever I marry woman,
and I’ll be married tomorrow.
I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfy man,
and you shall be married tomorrow.
I will content you, if what pleases you contents you,
and you shall be married tomorrow.
As you love Rosalind meet.
As you love Phebe meet.
And as I love no woman, I’ll meet.
Touchstone is given a small parody of the courtier which looks forward to Malvolio (‘I have flattered a lady; I have been politic with my friend, smooth with mine enemy’), and he steps into the spotlight for the last time with his set-piece of the quarrel on the seventh cause, the numbered structure of which is too clear to need analysing. This last speech is so popular with Jaques that it has to be repeated, thus underlining the solo nature of the wit in this play – it is the only ‘encore’ in Shakespeare. If eclipsed here, Rosalind is given the centre of the stage again for the Epilogue, and her witty symmetries, although only building up to a new variation on ‘Plaudite’, still seem in character, as does the concentric play on ‘boy: girl: boy’:
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you
as had beards that pleased me,
complexions that liked me,
and breaths that I defied not.
And I am sure, as many as have good beards,
or good faces,
or sweet breaths,
will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
Those are suitably clever patterns to end a very witty play, in which Shakespeare has developed the use of rhetorical patterns in prose to a greater brilliance and with more dramatic variety, than ever before or after. But he does not abandon rhetorical structure, rather, as we shall see, applies it to tragedy for new and important effects. Rosalind and Touchstone are not only witty in themselves, but the cause that eloquence is in other men.
The value of taking Twelfth Night here, and not after Julius Caesar and Hamlet, where it probably belongs, is not only that we associate it with the two comedies whose mood it clearly shares but that by juxtaposition within these comedies we can see how Shakespeare, having had a holiday with Wit in As You Like It, returns to the application of prose to Plot which he had so strongly achieved in Much Ado. One of the first things that we notice about Twelfth Night is the absence of any of the long, witty, solo speeches which dominate As You Like It: any prose soliloquies, such as those by Malvolio, are not performances at some point midway between the play and the audience, which is how C. L. Barber describes the position of Jaques and Touchstone, and, we could add, Rosalind (op. cit. p. 228) but are the consistent expressions of such a character in such a situation. Developing this observation, we notice how Feste’s wit, although being partly the normal expression of a clown, is quite integral to the situations which develop within the play. And as we follow through the parallel characters in the lower plots – Sir Toby Belch, Aguecheek, Maria, Malvolio – we realize that we have left behind the separate, Lyly-like development of As You Like It (where Phebe was the only link between two plot-levels, and a tenuous one at that) to return to Shakespeare’s own personal dramatic structure, where the various levels of the action cross and interact, providing significant oppositions as well as fruitful parallels. However, we must not take these observations too far, for the lower worlds of this play do not come into such meaningful contact with those above them as in Much Ado, and although the proportion of prose to verse is actually greater here than in As You Like It the prose-scenes contain much less of the central experience of the play: of all the witty comedies, Twelfth Night has the finest, and the most important poetry, together with the more delicate and responsive moods proper to verse.
Some of the differences between Twelfth Night and the preceding plays are simply accidental results of the major decisions which shaped the plot. Thus as there are no prose characters whose wit is changed by the experience of falling in love, then one type of stylistic change is absent. Indeed there is little stylistic development or ‘re-application’ in the play (Malvolio does not change – that is his tragedy) and little extended verbal wit or rhetorical structure. This time the clown is restricted to logic, and elsewhere the syntactical norm is that of prose conversation, enlivened only by the individualizing details for certain characters. Perhaps the greatest determinant cause of this decline in verbal humour here is the increased use of the comedy of situation, as befits a play which turns on disguise, deception, and the mistakes of confused identity. The major comic scenes in the play show this move away from verbal wit towards a humour which depends on our knowledge of certain incongruities hidden from the characters involved, as with the first over-hearing of Malvolio, and still more with his appearance to Olivia cross-gartered; as again with the situation of Malvolio off-stage (perhaps behind the curtain covering whatever inner space was used on the Elizabethan stage) as if in a dark room, with Feste pretending to be Sir Topas and later having a dialogue with himself: here the visual comedy is strengthened by the device of having Feste don a full disguise, even though Shakespeare later feels bound to disarm criticism of this surplus attraction: ‘Thou mightst have done this without thy beard and gown. He sees thee not.’ In those other scenes of comic confusion based on disguise and mistaken identity – such as Viola’s mock duel with Aguecheek, Antonio’s real challenge as he interrupts it, and the final inversion when Toby and Andrew attack ‘Cesario’ only to find it Sebastian and to be beaten for their pains – in all these scenes the comedy is visual and situational, and the prose of wit takes second place. And as the dramatic effect of these scenes is well appreciated, I will not labour that point, nor discuss the play in terms of the development of its plot, but rather pick out the significant applications of prose here for character and situation.
Although it plays a smaller part than usual, Shakespeare feels bound to include some verbal humour in the play, and having constructed a full noble household complete with Fool, Steward, and hangers-on, he makes Feste the major repository of wit. Throughout the play Feste gradually comes into contact with each of the main characters for a bout of wit, and although these are usually the real-life exchanges between the witty clown meeting a new arrival at the house and jesting with him for sixpences, (incidentally, by such and other means Olivia’s house is given a substantial dramatic presence), these combats have the added significance, as usual in Shakespeare, of showing the superior wit of whoever wins the bout. Thus at his first appearance Feste is confronted with Maria, the witty serving-woman (like Margaret in Much Ado) who has already put down Aguecheek (I, iii), and although Feste wins the first piece of repartee she conclusively beats him in the second, provoking his admiration and the explicit comment which draws attention to a character’s wit:
MARIA. You are resolute then?
FESTE. Not so neither, but I am resolved on two points.
MARIA. That if one break, the other will hold; or if both break, your gaskins fall.
FESTE. Apt in good faith, very apt. Well go thy way; if Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh, as any in Illyria.
(I, v)
Olivia now appears, and with an invocation for dexterity (like Hal before the entry of Falstaff after Gadshill) Feste attacks her complaint that he is ‘dry’ and ‘dishonest’ with a piece of logic which is so dazzling that it sends any editor into contortions:
Two faults, madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend. For give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry. Bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Any thing that’s mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy? As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty’s a flower.
That is as witty a piece of logic as anything by Touchstone, and far less peremptory. Feste is now brought closer to the play, for his ‘catechism’ of Olivia shows to her and to us that her mourning is superfluous: ‘The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.’ His wit is then used to make a still more important dramatic point, for it is contrasted with the sour ‘self-love’ of Malvolio, whose arrogant dismissal – ‘Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool’ – inevitably reminds us of Feste’s earlier words, and an idea which Shakespeare harps on throughout the play: ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit’, a sentence which could be taken as a motto for Malvolio, Belch, Aguecheek – to go no further.
Feste’s other appearances have less relationship with the plot, although in addition to their significance in terms of their outcome it is noticeable that Feste is always used to begin a scene, as a humorous ‘warming-up’. Thus when Viola encounters him alone (III, i) he takes the absolute equivocating manner of the obstreperous clown:
VIOLA. Save thee friend, and thy music. Dost thou live by thy tabor?
FESTE. No, sir, I live by the church.
VIOLA. Art thou a churchman?
FESTE. No such matter sir, I do live by the church; for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church.
The quickness of Viola’s wit is now shown in the way she immediately spots the device (antanaclasis, taking the second meaning) and returns it with an antimetabole:
So thou mayst say the king lies by a beggar, if a beggar dwell near him; or the church stands by the tabor, if thy tabor stand by the church.
And although Feste is allowed to divert the blow – ‘To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward,’ to an Elizabethan eye Viola gains stature from her victory over this ‘corrupter of words’. The only connection between this scene and the main action is perhaps the equivocation on ‘beard’, but when Sebastian duly comes into the clown’s path (IV, i, 1–25) the confusion shown by Feste does reflect the general chaos produced by the crossing of the wires at this stage of the plot: ‘Nothing that is so, is so.’ But the clown achieves his victory nonetheless, putting Sebastian down for his linguistic affectation, a small but recurrent comic ingredient in Shakespeare: ‘Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid that this great lubber the world will prove a cockney’ (as Sir Topas, Feste also parodies the pedantical jargon which he has used mockingly earlier). In his final encounters, with Fabian and Orsino (V, i, 1–53) the Clown is in his normal role, providing wit for rewards, and is given the usual equivocation but also a most witty revival of his earlier logical style, replying to the question ‘How dost thou’ in a paradox: ‘the better for my foes, and the worse for my friends’, which he then develops to bring out the wisdom in folly:
Marry, sir, they praise me, and make an ass of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass; so that by my foes sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused; so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives, why then the worse for my friends and the better for my foes.
Shakespeare’s clowns are never far from the ‘conclusions’ of syllogistic reasoning, and although a taste for verbal wit – and particularly the abuse of logic – is perhaps the last thing that the modern reader of Shakespeare develops, it is a necessary faculty if we are to appreciate his many subtleties, and when we have it we are guaranteed much quiet amusement – and increasingly a deeper understanding of the mental processes of his characters.
The prose of Twelfth Night is largely given to the lower orders of society and to the upper representatives when they come into contact with their servants and dependants. With Viola it is sometimes associated with her disguise, and when she is left alone at the end of a prose-scene she sometimes naturally ascends to the higher dignity of verse for a soliloquy (as at the end of II, ii; III, iv, and left alone III, i, 67–75). The only scene in which upper characters speak prose to each other is – again quite naturally within Shakespeare’s conventions – also the most mocking and ironic scene between any of them, Viola’s first embassy to Olivia (I, v). Here we find almost the only piece of that direct mockery of Romance (there is, I take it, much indirect mockery in the character and verse of Orsino) which had been so important for Shakespeare in his younger comedies, but one which does fulfil here its normal function in being ironic comment accompanying a love-interest which is ultimately to be taken seriously. However this deflation of the Romance code is put to a new and piquant dramatic situation, for the romantic pretensions of Orsino are not deflated directly but in the form of his ambassador, in a way which while preserving Orsino’s dignity inevitably reflects back on him. The scene is given further complexity in that Viola-Cesario is made to produce the romantic declaration which we know she would rather address to Orsino, and Olivia only mocks Romance on that statutory last lap of independence before succumbing to it too and losing her sharpness of wit (the developments of several Acts in Much Ado and As You Like It are thus compressed into one scene).
The detail of the mockery is built up of several of the most familiar prose devices, especially imagery: while Olivia’s attendants are still present, Viola refrains from launching into her full declaration (although there is some amusing play with the ‘speech’ and her ‘part’), and is given (or uses, as it seems to us in the theatre) images which are suitably extravagant for a young gallant: ‘by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play’ … ‘What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead; to your ears, divinity; to any other’s, profanation.’ This is the romantic verging on the blasphemous again, as with Rosalind, and as they are left alone Olivia takes up the image in a witty piece of repartee:
OLIVIA. Now sir, what is your text?
VIOLA. Most sweet lady –
OLIVIA. A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text?
VIOLA. In Orsino’s bosom.
OLIVIA. In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?
VIOLA. TO answer by the method, in the first of his heart.
OLIVIA. O, I have read it; it is heresy.
This is the only time in the play (apart from the duel, and there for other reasons) that Viola is not dominant by her wit, and it is only right that Olivia should be allowed to win, being after all joint heroine. The triumph of wit over love continues as Viola’s feminine rivalry gets the better of her in her curiosity to see Olivia’s face: Olivia agrees with a mocking image—’we will draw the curtain, and show you the picture’ – and as femininity becomes cattiness with Viola’s suggestion of cosmetic help Olivia wins with another image: ‘ ‘Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.’ Viola now launches into verse, into her prepared speech, and into the conventional arguments for marriage which are found in the early Sonnets, only for Olivia to seize on the conventional image ‘And leave the world no copy’ and deflate it by taking it quite literally and then arranging it in ‘inventorial’ form:
O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will –
as, item two lips, indifferent red;
item two gray eyes, with lids to them;
item one neck
one chin
and so forth.
But although Olivia mocks the vocabulary of romance here, Viola’s persistency impresses her, and she is magnetically drawn up to the level of verse and so to the medium and the mood in which Cupid can strike.
As that final exchange showed, Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the way in which a character will react to the images used by another character is considerable: we have seen several examples of the significance of the failure to understand an image, and in Olivia’s play with ‘text’ and ‘copy’ we see the function of the acceptance or refusal of an image (I suppose this is an instance of the ‘forensic’ category of imagery, with a character perceiving what effect the image is meant to have and then rejecting it). So earlier in this scene Viola had ridiculed the resourceful Maria by developing her sailing image to the point of absurdity:
MARIA. Will you hoist sail, sir, here lies your way.
VIOLA. No good swabber, I am to hull here a little longer.
Later in the play (III, i, 92–3) Viola is used to mock Sir Toby, who greets her with his most affected gentlemanly images: ‘Will you encounter the house? My niece is desirous you should enter, if your trade be to her. … Taste your legs sir, put them in motion.’ Viola at first bandies the image back, ‘I am bound to your niece, sir, I mean she is the list of my voyage,’ but then she uses the ploy of not understanding the image in order to call his bluff: ‘My legs do better understand sir, than I understand what you mean by bidding me taste my legs.’ And so he is reduced to producing the mundane sense: ‘I mean to go sir, to enter,’ which she can then cap with an image like his: ‘I will answer you with gait and entrance.’ But if Viola wins here, she is later put down in the duel between unwilling protagonists (a literal manifestation of the encounter metaphorically expected in Much Ado), not only by her ludicrous behaviour, but by the images used both to describe her fear of Aguecheek: she is ‘horribly conceited of him; and pants, and looks pale, as if a bear were at his heels’ (III, iv, 325), and also to mock them jointly: ‘This will so fright them both, that they will kill one another by the look, like cockatrices’ (215). Indeed throughout Twelfth Night almost everyone is deflated at some time or another, either by the situation, or by imagery ranging from the light-hearted to the more corrective poles (Orsino and Olivia are the only ones to be spared direct irony, unless it be in the confusion of sexes which deceives them for so long—but they are the less important for being spared) and the normal equality of wit and status in Shakespearian Comedy is perfectly demonstrated here, as a current of mockery of varying strengths leaves no idols standing, bringing everyone down to the same human level.
The biggest comic object of mockery, and indeed a comic butt par excellence in that our sympathies are never likely to be aroused for him, is Andrew Aguecheek. He has designs on Olivia, as have Orsino and Malvolio, and in varying degrees all three are manifestly unsuitable, but whereas the other two have certain positive characteristics which make them so, he has none, being almost a definition by negatives. He is the most uninventive lover yet, exceeding even Slender in this, for although Slender is dependent on his book of riddles or Songs and Sonnets, Aguecheek is a puppet who has to have the words put into his mouth:
MARIA. Fare you well gentlemen.
TOBY. An thou let part so Sir Andrew, would thou mightst never draw sword again.
ANDREW. An you part so mistress, I would I might never draw sword again.
(I, iii, 65)
This propensity to echo somebody else’s ideas is seen at its most amusing after Malvolio has been duped with the letter, and Toby expresses his admiration for Maria:
TOBY. I could marry this wench for this device.
ANDREW. So could I too.
TOBY. And ask no other dowry with her, but such another jest.
ANDREW. Nor I neither.
[Enter Maria]
TOBY. Wilt thou set thy foot o’my neck?
ANDREW. Or o’mine either?
TOBY. Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip, and become thy bond-slave?
ANDREW. I’faith, or I either?(II, v, 199–210)
The last example of his desultory aping of Toby occurs after Feste praises him for his ‘admirable fooling’, and Aguecheek observes peevishly, with an unconscious pun at the end; ‘Ay, he does well enough if he be disposed, and so do I too: he does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural’ (II, iii, 89).
The feebleness of Aguecheek’s wit is shown by other stylistic means, starting from the normal Shakespearian symptom of weak wits, malapropism, with the inevitable confusion of ‘incarnate’ (V, i), and a new development in that he seems to suspect a bawdy meaning where there is none, as with his reaction to ‘accost’:
ANDREW. Good Mistress Mary Accost –
TOBY. You mistake knight. Accost is front her, board her, woo her, assail her.
ANDREW. By my troth I would not undertake her in this company. Is that the meaning of accost?
(I, iii)
and to Malvolio’s identification of the handwriting: ‘Her C’s, her U’s, and her T’s; why that?’ (II, v). Like other simple wits he is impressed by fine words, particularly Viola’s extravagant compliments to Olivia, which he comments on aside: ‘That youth’s a rare courtier; rain odours—well.… Odours, pregnant, and vouchsafed-I’ll get ‘em all three already.’ This charmingly naïve weakness for fine phrases is neatly punctured when he comments on Feste’s singing: ‘A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight’, and Toby adds an equally rich-sounding word also involving a transference of senses: ‘A contagious breath’. This is already ridiculous, but Andrew approves of it: ‘Very sweet, and contagious, i’ faith’, and Toby’s final drunken expansion of the idea makes it inescapably so: ‘To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion’ (II, iii). And like other Shakespearian simpletons he is characterized by the non-sequitur, as his wit is often not robust enough for him to develop a thought in a connected line. Thus when Toby asks him, ‘Art thou good at these kickshawes knight?’ he answers, ‘As any man in Illyria, whatsoever he be’, which is positive enough, but he follows it with a qualification that destroys it: ‘under the degree of my betters’, and then adds another irrelevant point: ‘and yet I will not compare with an old man’ (I, iii, 125: query, ‘young’?). This collapse into irrelevance is seen elsewhere, but best of all in his challenge to Viola, where each semi-colon marks an entirely unconnected beginning: ‘Thou com’st to the Lady Olivia, and in my sight she uses thee kindly; but thou liest in thy throat; that is not the matter I challenge thee for.… I will waylay thee going home; where if it be thy chance to kill me – Thou kill’st me like a rogue and a villain’ (III, iv, 170–80). As Fabian is made to say: ‘Very brief, and to exceeding good sense-less’.
Aguecheek is all of a piece feeble throughout, but the most original sign of his limited comprehension is his reaction to abuse. Like most of the significant stylistic effects in Shakespeare’s prose, this is twice repeated: first he does not see the Clown’s joke against him in the catch ‘Hold thy peace, thou knave’:
FESTE. I shall be constrained in’t to call thee knave, knight.
ANDREW. ‘Tis not the first time I have constrained one to call me knave.
His passivity is ludicrous because he has wit enough to record the abuse, but not enough to see or resent the implication. The second time is when they overhear Malvolio’s fantasy speech to Toby:
MALVOLIO. Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight –
ANDREW. That’s me I warrant you.
MALVOLIO. One Sir Andrew –
ANDREW. I knew ‘twas I, for many do call me fool.
This is still more amusing as he is actually pleased at having identified himself. Not surprisingly Aguecheek is the target for much ridicule, and the wittiest images in the play are directed against him, especially by Toby, both to his face: ‘Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig. I would not so much as make water but in a sink-a-pace’ (I, iii), and in kindling him to the duel: ‘Go, Sir Andrew; scout me for him at the corner of the churchyard like a bum-baily’ (III, iv). Toby is wittier and more abusive behind his back: ‘if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I’ll eat the rest of th’anatomy’ (III, ii), but when their challenge to Viola misfires and they are beaten by Sebastian, Belch finally reveals his true opinion of him to his face: ‘An ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave; a thin-faced knave, a gull’. However, as Sir Toby has at last been deflated too then we take the images more as emblems of his own discomfort. The most extended mock of Aguecheek is that from Fabian explaining Olivia’s favours to Viola; and making a deliberate pun (‘dormouse’ for ‘dormant’): ‘She did show favour to the youth in your sight, only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart, and brimstone in your liver… you are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard’ (III, ii). Aguecheek’s reaction is characteristic, for instead of noticing and objecting to the images, as any character of spirit would, he protests his dislike of becoming a ‘politician’ – little chance.
Sir Toby Belch’s images are universally abusive, a detail which shows his bluff egotism and irreverence for all – in this as in other things he is a pocket-sized Falstaff. But for his intended, Maria, his images are naturally more affectionate and also serve to characterize him by the two main sources from which he draws them: first, his sporting life: ‘She’s a beagle, true-bred’ (II, iii); ‘Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip’ (a game with dice); ‘the youngest wren of nine’; secondly his pretensions to learning: ‘my metal of India’ (II, v), ‘To the gates of Tartar’ (II, v), ‘Good night, Penthesilea’ (II, iii) – an allusion to the Queen of the Amazons, killed at Troy by Achilles (Belch?). Toby’s irreverence (which provides the force for the much needed correction of Malvolio – ‘Sneck up! … Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’) is also seen in his scornful wit, especially in his use of equivocation to evade the issue:
MARIA. Your cousin, my lady, takes great exceptions to your ill hours.
TOBY. Why let her except before excepted.
MARIA. Ay, but you must confine yourself within the modest limits of order.
TOBY. Confine? I’ll confine myself no finer than I am. These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots too.
His evasive speciousness, when he replies to Maria’s taunt that Aguecheek is ‘drunk nightly in your company’, recalls Sir John’s explanation of how he lost his voice: ‘With drinking healths to my niece’ (I, iii). The final tool for evasion is, as so often, comic logic, as he corrects the ‘conclusion’ of Aguecheek’s syllogism to proffer a more subtle one of his own:
TOBY. Not to be a-bed after midnight, is to be up betimes, and diliculo surgere, thou know’st –
ANDREW. Nay by troth I know not. But I know, to be up late, is to be up late.
TOBY. A false conclusion. I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight, is to go to bed betimes.
Two stylistic variations from his witty norm are significant, albeit small (it is typical of the interest in plot and situation in the play that little is made of any stylistic changes): first, when his wit is drowned, its confusion is expressed by malapropism: ‘by this lethargy?’-’Lechery! I defy lechery’ (I, v); and secondly he terrifies Viola before the duel by listing Aguecheek’s fearful attributes in parallel form (‘his rage, skill, fury and impetuosity’) a trick which Fabian obediently takes up (III, iv). Sir Toby is an example of the economy of Shakespeare’s stylistic characterization, for his words are only a small guide to his personality – it is more what he says and does, than how he says it.
But for the major prose-character of the play, Malvolio, the details of language are again significant. His arrogance is established mainly by his attitude, actions, and by external comment, but is also seen in his imagery: Viola’s epicene appearance is ‘As a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ‘tis almost an apple. ‘Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man’; the nocturnal trio ‘gabble like tinkers’ and ‘squeak out’ their ‘coziers’ catches’ (II, iii). Toby finds an appropriate image for this arrogance: ‘the niggardly rascally sheep-biter’. It comes out again in his account of Viola’s embassy, where his aloof manner, which resembles Casca’s (if not quite so harsh) is expressed in similar means, by contemptuous repetitions which make the narrative (and the reason for it) seem banal: ‘yond young fellow swears he will speak with you. I told him you were sick; … and (he) therefore comes to speak with you. I told him you were asleep; … (he) therefore comes to speak with you.’ He has, too, Casca’s trick of answering questions in the most unhelpful way possible, a species of equivocation:
MALVOLIO.… But he’ll speak with you.
OLIVIA. What kind o’man is he?
MALVOLIO. Why of mankind.
OLIVIA. What manner of man?
MALVOLIO. Of very ill manner. He’ll speak with you, will you or no.
(I, v)
His affectations are punctured stylistically in a small detail by juxtaposition: the Fool’s parting words to Viola after their wit-bout are: ‘who you are, and what you would are out of my welkin – I might say element, but the word is over-worn’ (III, i, 65). Shakespeare recalls the point later and makes Malvolio indignantly attack Toby and the plotters: ‘You are idle shallow things; I am not of your element’ (III, iv, 137).
But the great deflation of Malvolio is of course the overhearing-scene, the most amusing deception in all the comedies. Malvolio is heralded by Maria: ‘he has been yonder i’ the sun practising behaviour to his own shadow this half-hour’ – like Ford in the Merry Wipes, the prior existence of an obsession is greater argument for deflating it. He is discovered day-dreaming – ‘To be Count Malvolio’ – on that favourite Renaissance topic, the relative power of Virtue and Fortune in shaping a man’s career: unlike Machiavelli, he has little confidence in virtu (or excuses his own lack of it):’ ‘Tis but fortune, all is fortune.’ As he develops this fantasy world with Malvolio as Prince a fine stylistic detail is the way that the intensity of his wish expresses itself in the verb tenses he uses: not ‘then I could’ or ‘then I might’, but the present definite (with a brief use of the infinitive and the present perfect), especially the present participle, which is used to suggest the action, situation, and circumstantial detail that have just preceded this moment – the verb tenses dramatize his savouring of the experience of having power:
Having been three months married to her, sitting in my state – Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown; having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping – And then to have the humour of state; and after a demure travel of regard – telling them I know my place, as I would they should do theirs – to ask for my kinsman Toby – Seven of my people with an obedient start, make out for him, I frown the while, and …
and so on: the immediacy of Malvolio’s vision, as revealed in the verb-tenses, is so strong that we can almost see him in action (it is like Mistress Quickly’s reminiscence of Falstaff’s broken promise, for here too through the details of style we see the man himself). But of course, although Malvolio does not realize it, his pretensions are being undermined both by the revelation of his dissembling and the conscious surface which he can vary (‘after a demure travel of regard’ – ‘quenching my familiar smile with an austere regard of control’), and also by the fact that his hypothetical present tense is being accompanied by the real present happening, the comments of the plotters: ‘O, for a stone-bow to hit him in the eye!’. Here for almost the first time the prose aside has the function of also releasing our feelings towards the person being mocked by it, as Toby’s long-suppressed abuse expresses what we would like to do – ‘And does not Toby take you a blow o’ the lips then?’
The plot has been laid, and Malvolio walks into it. The image that naturally presents itself is of an animal being caught in a trap, and as in the twin deception scenes of Much Ado Shakespeare is at pains to punctuate the gulling of Malvolio with trap metaphors which will focus the action verbally, and remind us of the situation being exploited. This situational use of imagery here does not seem to have been noticed, although it is perfectly consistent. Maria announces his arrival: ‘for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling’ (II, v, 27), and Fabian comments on his as yet uncorrected arrogance with an image similar to that used for Pistol immediately before his hubris was punctured by Fluellen: ‘Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes.’ As he steps further into the trap the images express the situation with remarkable detail and variety:
FABIAN. Now is the woodcock near the dish. (92)
TOBY. Marry hang thee brock! (112; = badger)
FABIAN. What dish o’poison has she dressed him!
TOBY. And with what wing the staniel checks at it! (123–5)
MALVOLIO. Softly–M, O, A, I–
TOBY. O ay, make up that, he is now at a cold scent.
FABIAN. Sowter will cry upon’t for all this, though it be as rank as a fox.
MALVOLIO. M – Malvolio – M – why that begins my name.
FABIAN. Did not I say he would work it out; the cur is excellent at faults.
(133–40)
Thus Maria is indeed a ‘noble gull-catcher’, and they are later right to ‘pursue him now lest the device take air and taint’. As Shakespeare has–whether deliberately or not – constructed a whole consistent image-sequence to dramatize this situation, it is a rare ironic effect that Malvolio should be made to see himself as the hunter of Olivia: ‘I have limed her, but it is Jove’s doing, and Jove make me thankful’ (III, iv, 81). The tables have already been turned.
The overreacher is also overreached in his worship of ‘the humour of state’ by the very style of the letter written to deceive him. Malvolio has been described for us by Maria as ‘a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths’ (II, iii, 160–3). The word ‘state’ is glossed by Dover Wilson in his New Cambridge edition as ‘ceremony, deportment’, but this is incorrect (it would in any case be difficult to utter ‘swarths’ of it) – the sense required here is ‘statesmanship’ (OED sb. IV. b), ‘government’, ‘political theory and practice’, as in the English version of the Renaissance Italian concept, ragioni di stato, reasons of state. Malvolio is a ‘time-server’, a politician, with all the unpleasant connotations which that word had for an Elizabethan, as reflected elsewhere in the play, in Aguecheek’s naive distrust of ‘policy’: ‘An’t be any way, it must be with valour, for policy I hate, I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician’ (III, ii), and still more sharply in Falstaff’s saturnal-ian inversion: ‘we are politicians, Malvolio’s a Peg-a-Ramsey’ (II, iii). This being so, it was an ingenious idea of Shakespeare’s to cast the letter laid to deceive him into the style of the very authors which an ambitious politician would study, the style nourished on the pregnant aphorisms of Machiavelli and Guicciardini and boiled down to precepts at their barest: the English versions might be the aculeate memoranda of Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, or Bacon’s Essays in their first form (1597) or indeed in many cruder examples of the ‘Advice’ literature. The precept in the form of a bare imperative, such as we find it in this letter – ‘let thy tongue tang arguments of state’ – is more characteristic of Harvey and the cruder works (or Polonius), but the balancing of observation in parallel clauses beginning with ‘some’ is more like Bacon, as in the opening of ‘Studies’: ‘Some bookes are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ I do not want to suggest any definite source for this style, but rather to refer briefly to a whole convention of terse advice for self-betterment.
Shakespeare catches perfectly the mnemonic balances of this tradition, and also its direct, pithy imperatives:
Some are born great,
some achieve greatness, and
some have greatness thrust upon them.
Thy Fates open their hands,
let thy blood and spirit embrace them; …
cast thy humble slough, and appear fresh.
Be opposite with a kinsman,
surly with servants.
Let thy tongue tang arguments of state;
put thyself into the trick of singularity.
These are the bare bones of advice for getting on (of course, perfectly adapted to this dramatic situation), and the final reference to touching ‘Fortune’s fingers’ brings us back both to Malvolio’s own reflections and recalls the central place of ambition in the literature of the Faber Fortunae (as in Gabriel Harvey’s anguished recognition of lost opportunities). Malvolio’s reaction to the letter is ideal, couched in the same bare style and correctly answering the imperative ‘do’ with the future ‘I will,’ but even more precisely (as, too, with his translation of the vagueness of ‘a kinsman’ – as in a horoscope – into the specific: ‘Sir Toby’):
I will be proud,
I will read politic authors,
I will baffle Sir Toby,
I will wash off gross acquaintance,
I will be point-devise, the very man.
These might almost be sub-titled ‘Malvolio’s Resolves’, but the ruthless dignity here revealed is shattered for us as he answers the final imperative, ‘Remember who commended thy yellow stockings’, with an undignified rush of resolves, his haste now dropping the repeated ‘I will’: ‘I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on.’ But we are reminded of the inevitable outcome by the cool symmetries with which Maria balances ‘resolve’ and reaction:
He will come to her
in yellow stockings, and ‘tis a colour she abhors,
and cross-gartered, a fashion she detests.
The outcome of the plot is one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant visual and situational comic scenes, especially as Olivia is given an ironic reminder of Malvolio’s previous character:
Where is Malvolio? He is sad and civil,
And suits well for a servant with my fortunes.
(III, iv, 5)
Another amusing detail of character is the hint of the physical discomfort which his ‘point-devise’ disguise is causing him: ‘Sad, lady? I could be sad. This does make some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering, but what of that?’ But some of the comic effects are reinforced by the language, as with the device coined by Shakespeare for the deceived Benedick, that of the gull looking for a second meaning in words which we know to be innocent of one. We have seen Malvolio falling into this trap in the letter-scene:
‘I may command where I adore.’ Why she may command me. I serve her, she is my lady. Why this is evident to any formal capacity.… ‘M, O, A, I.’ This simulation is not as the former; and yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me …
This willingness to seek a double meaning to his own advantage is well exploited now as he confronts Olivia:
OLIVIA. Wilt thou go to bed Malvolio?
MALVOLIO. To bed? Ay sweetheart, and I’ll come to thee.
Another detail caught up appropriately here is his arrogance towards his inferior, shown now to Maria, but now doubly undercut, both by the situation and by the bird-image:
MARIA. How do you Malvolio?
MALVOLIO. At your request? Yes, nightingales answer daws.
The nightingale is ‘A very, very’ – woodcock. And a still wittier exploitation of a previous style is the way that, as he repeats the precepts to Olivia, she is made to punctuate them with her shocked comments, so isolating the ludicrousness:
‘Some are born great –’ Ha?
‘Some achieve greatness –’ What sayst thou?
‘And some have greatness thrust upon them.’
Heaven restore thee!
But despite her shock his vanity encloses him, and in a final soliloquy he recalls the precepts yet again (‘ass, that cons state without book’), now adding some more of his own in the same pithy parallel clauses, thus interpreting Olivia’s precepts (we certainly have not heard them):
and consequently sets down the manner how;
as a sad face,
a reverent carriage,
a slow tongue,
in the habit of some sir of note, and so forth.
His hubris (‘I have limed her’) comes out still more in the sudden swell of his rhetoric: ‘ “Fellow”! Not Malvolio, nor after my degree, but “fellow”! Why everything adheres together, that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance – what can be said? Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.’ But at this highest moment of the overreacher the plotters enter to ‘have him in a dark room and bound’. Thus Malvolio perceives the force of the images in which the English master of ‘state’, summed up such a career: ‘the rising unto place is laborious … The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.’
Malvolio’s ‘penance’ is again largely an affair of visual and situational comedy, but two small linguistic details stand out. In the scene immediately following this soliloquy, there is a choice stylistic contrast as the plotters taunt him with being mad: he answers them with majestic dignity: ‘Go off, I discard you’, but is consoled with cosy, undignified colloquial names:
TOBY. Why how now my bawcock? How dost thou chuck?
MALVOLIO. Sir!
TOBY. Ay Biddy, come with me. What man, ‘tis not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan. Hang him, foul collier!
When he is eventually bound and gagged his total humiliation is also conveyed verbally, in his plaintive repetitions of ‘Sir Topas’ and ‘Fool’ (IV, ii). The final exploitation of style and character comes in the last scene, as after his dignified and bitter letter Feste explains the whole device (doubtless with appropriate mimicry), recalling Fortune’s precepts but with a crude version of the third term: ‘some have greatness thrown upon them’. And the recollection of Malvolio’s initial mock now completes the sense of the philosophical antimetabole, ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit’ with an image appropriate to the clown and his toys: ‘But do you remember – “madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal, an you smile not, he’s gagged.” And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ It is worth noting that of all Shakespeare’s comic butts so far, Malvolio has received the sharpest, least humane, most humiliating correction. But it has not been the statutory mock of a semi-stereotyped comic figure unimportant to the action, rather a perfectly realistic attack on the faults of a fully-defined personality. Indeed everything in Twelfth Night is organized in coherent terms of situation and character: there is no superfluous wit (to adopt for the moment a modern attitude to wit in comedy), for Feste is a jester, and even the gaffes of Aguecheek, the last of the simpletons, are fully in character; nor are there any superfluous rhetorical symmetries, for the norm of naturalistic conversation is only substantially broken for Malvolio’s letter and his reactions to it, and this piece of stylistic invention captures not just the man but the milieu. In this last matter Twelfth Night is a turning-point in Shakespearian Comedy, for in future the prose of wit – with unimportant exceptions – is subordinated to character and situation more naturalistically conceived.