5

Women’s Rites

‘As Secret as Maidenhead’

I

The history of the family, sex and marriage, long of interest to playwrights and novelists, has lately been the subject of several illuminating studies by demographic historians. Drawing upon such evidence as parish registers, diaries, autobiographies, household listing, family correspondence and church court records, scholars like Lawrence Stone, Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure have attempted to survey the domestic relationships and sexual habits of previous generations in England. Stone, in particular, has sought to draw conclusions and establish trends from the data he has collected, creating what one reviewer called a ‘typology’¹ of changes in social behavior over the period 1500–1800.

In approaching the predominant patterns of sexual and marital behavior in Shakespeare’s plays, it will be useful to consider some of this material, as a way of understanding both what the playwright might have inherited and observed from his times, and how he changed it to conform to his own dramatic purposes. The plays reflect contemporary social history as well as the writings of Elizabethan historians, and the canons of the church courts are sources in some ways as germane to our inquiry as the novelle of Lodge and Greene.

Before Lord Hardwicke’s clarifying Marriage Act of 1753, the rite of marriage itself was quite ambiguously defined in England, consisting as it did of no less than five separate steps: (1) a written financial contract between the parents; (2) the spousals, or contract, a formal exchange of oral promises; (3) the proclamation of banns three times in the local church of one of the parties; (4) the wedding ceremony in church; and (5) the sexual consummation. This sequence was further complicated by the existence of two kinds of spousals, the contract per verba de futuro and the contract per verba de praesenti. As their names imply, the contract per verba de futuro involved promises to marry in the future, and the contract per verba de praesenti promises couched in the present tense (as, ‘I do take thee for my wife’). This second kind of promise, in the present tense, was considered by ecclesiastical law to be a binding legal marriage, which would invalidate a later church wedding to another person. The contract per verba de futuro also became binding if it was followed by sexual consummation.²

Bearing this information in mind, we can, for example, see more clearly into the complexities of Measure for Measure. Claudio has been imprisoned for the sin of sexual intercourse with his fiancée, in a judgment which echoes the disapproval of the church; yet by that church’s law he is nonetheless (because of that act) now legally married to Juliet. Angelo, in the same play, has apparently engaged at least in a contract per verba de futuro with Mariana. According to the duke,

She should this Angelo have married; was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wracked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister.

(III. i. 213–17)

In the shipwreck Mariana lost not only her brother and her dowry, but also her ‘combinate husband’ (222), for Angelo then abandoned his vows, and accused her falsely of dishonor. The ‘bed trick’ arranged by the duke thus adds sexual consummation to the oral contract, and neatly completes the marriage. It is from this tangled ambiguity of terms and steps that Mariana derives the riddle of her status as ‘neither maid, widow, nor wife’ (V. i. 177–8).

The matter of contract and precontract is also raised in King Lear, where Albany ironically intercedes in Regan’s claim to Edmund’s hand: ‘For your claim, fair sister,’ he declares,

I bar it in the interest of my wife.

‘Tis she is subcontracted to this lord,

And I, her husband, contradict your banes.

If you will marry, make your loves to me;

My lady is bespoke.

(V. iii. 85–90)

This was indeed the purpose of the banns, to allow allegations of precontract to be heard; Albany deliberately mocks the process, calling into question yet another one of the play’s problematic ‘bonds’. Edmund himself will take up the figure as he lies mortally wounded, when, receiving news of the sisters’ death, he announces ‘I was contracted to them both: all three / Now marry in an instant’ (230–1). The familiar Renaissance pun on ‘die’ is here combined with the language of contractual marriage to produce an effect that is doubly disconcerting.

Elsewhere in the plays we hear Falstaff boasting that he has conscripted ‘contracted bachelors, such as had been asked twice on the banes’ (1HIV IV. ii. 16–17)-and who are thus presumably eager to buy their freedom – and we witness Katherine’s anticipation of her shame when Petruchio fails to appear: ‘to be noted for a merry man, / He’ll woo a thousand, ‘point the day of marriage, / Make friends, invite, and proclaim the banns, / Yet never means to wed where he hath wooed’ (Shr. III. ii. 14–17). The aborted marriage ceremony of Claudio and Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, which to Benedick ‘looks not like a nuptial’ (IV. i. 67), is an instance of the denial of contract at the stage of the church wedding, on grounds similar to those feigned by Angelo: the dishonorable conduct of the bride.

In an attempt to regularize and control marital proceedings which seemed to encourage lax behavior, the Anglican canons of 1604 laid down strict rules about the times and places of church weddings. They were to occur only between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon, in the local parish of one of the partners – again, we assume, to ensure that no conflicting precontract existed. Marriages performed in secular places like inns, or at inappropriate times, such as night, would incur serious penalties for the clergyman. The hedge-priest Sir Oliver Mar-Text in As You Like It is a good example of the kind of clergyman the canons wished to discourage, for reasons which are made clear in an exchange between Jaques and Touchstone:

Jaques And will you, being a man of your breeding, be married under a bush like a beggar? 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.

Touchstone    [Aside] I am not in the mind but I were better to be married of him than of another; for he is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.

(III. iii. 81–92)

In the event, Touchstone is persuaded, and rejects the services of Sir Oliver to join instead in the ‘blessed bond of board and bed’ (V. iv. 142) presided over by Hymen, the god of ‘high wedlock’ (144).

Olivia in Twelfth Night is clearly more amenable to the idea of permanence in marriage, persuading Sebastian to ‘go with me and with this holy man / Into the chantry by’ (IV. ii. 23–4), the nearby parish chapel. The ceremony there performed, ‘a contract of eternal bond of love’ (V. i. 155), is probably a contract per verba de praesenti, given Olivia’s impatience and eagerness; in any case she subsequently addresses Viola-Cesario (to whom she thinks she is contracted) as ‘husband’ (V. i. 141). On the other hand, in both The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, the contract seems clearly per verba de futuro: Florizel speaks of ‘that nuptial, which / We two have sworn shall come’ (WT IV. iv. 50–1), and asserts his resolute chastity, while Prospero enjoins Ferdinand not to ‘break [Miranda’s] virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be minist’red’ (Tmp. IV. i. 15–17).

Another common situation the canons of 1604 sought to correct was that of precipitate early marriage; marriages between persons less than twenty-one years of age were in that year prohibited without the consent of parents or guardians. Yet once again, although a clergyman performing such a ceremony was liable to punishment, the marriages so performed were deemed both valid and irrevocable. The problem, of course, predated the attempted solution, and Shakespeare touched on it in the situation of Romeo and Juliet. The place of their secret marriage is acceptable – the friar’s cell – and the time equally so – it is something after half-past-nine in the morning (II. v. 1–2); these particulars might be seen as emphasizing the spiritual legitimacy of the marriage. Yet the subsequent suggestion made by Juliet’s Nurse, that having seen Romeo banished she should consent to marry Paris, is more outrageous to modern sensibilities than it would have been to a contemporary audience. Bigamy was a frequent occurrence, which usually went unpunished and even undetected; it was not until 1603 that it became a civil offense.³ As early as the first act the Nurse had expressed the ambiguous desire to ‘see thee married once’ (I. iii. 61), leaving the door open for more; her pragmatic observation ‘Your first is dead – or ‘twere as good he were / As living here and you no use of him’ (III. v. 226–7) gave voice to a common sentiment, particularly among the lower classes – though needless to say not one that Shakespeare urged upon his hearers.

The greatest violation committed by Romeo and Juliet, however, was in marrying without their parents’ permission – for this action struck at the core of the entire social system. The objectives of marriage were the consolidation and safeguarding of family property, the acquisition of further property or other financial advantage, and the continuity of the family lineage and name through procreation. It was an accepted fact of sixteenth-century life that marriages were arranged by the parents, based upon these economic considerations, and without regard to ties of affection or personal choice. Indeed Dr Johnson, writing two hundred years later, could still express the conviction that ‘marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter’.⁴ The doctrine of filial obedience in the sixteenth century was based firmly upon the Fifth Commandment, as stressed by both Protestant clergymen and spokesmen for the state,⁵ but its roots were as much economic and political as they were moral. Thus Lawrence Stone suggests:

To an Elizabethan audience the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, like that of Othello, lay not so much in their ill-starred romance as in the way they brought destruction upon themselves by violating the norms of the society in which they lived, which in the former case meant strict filial obedience and loyalty to the traditional friendships and enmities of the lineage. An Elizabethan courtier would be familiar enough with the bewitching passion of love to feel some sympathy with the young couple, but he would see clearly enough where duty lay.⁶

Naturally enough, the economic considerations were most visible, if not necessarily most important, among the great families and the nobility. The opening scene of King Lear is not only an abdication and a division of the kingdom, but also, by design, a betrothal. Cordelia is courted by two men of noble lineage, who are significantly described by epithets of property: ‘to [her] young love / The vines of France and milk of Burgundy / Strive to be interest’ (I. i. 83–5). But once ‘her price is fallen,’ (197) Burgundy refuses her hand: ‘Election makes not up on such conditions’ (206). The gallant rejoinder of France, ‘She is herself a dowry’ (241), expresses a satisfying sentiment from the vocabulary of romantic love, but remains a most untypical point of view for an Elizabethan monarch. Cordelia’s corresponding idealism (‘Peace be with Burgundy. / Since that respects of fortune are his love, / I shall not be his wife’ – 247–9) underscores the fact that this attitude is an unusual and symbolic departure from the social norm, germane to Shakespeare’s dramatic purposes, and deliberately contrary to accepted political and economic custom. The norm would probably be represented more nearly by Angelo’s rejection of the dowerless Mariana, or by Bertram’s refusal to have a ‘poor physician’s daughter’ as his wife (All’s Well II. iii. 116).

But then Shakespeare is not exclusively concerned with portraying norms. The elements of social realism in his plays rather serve as a background for the emblematic patterns he devises, and as counterpoint to his central characters and their actions. The concept of romantic love, celebrated by courtiers in England since the twelfth century and fostered in Shakespeare’s time by both poets and playwrights, offered a beguiling literary alternative to the cold facts of sexual and marital behavior. The nobles and the upper classes must have known both fact and art, and perhaps – like the lords in Love’s Labor’s Lost – allowed the latter to influence the former. But despite the appeal of a conceit like love at first sight, ‘falling in love’ as it was popularized by Petrarch and depicted in Shakespearean comedy remained very much a minority experience, especially among the propertied classes.⁷

The pragmatic approach to marriage and family planning had its counterpart in the process of child-rearing itself, and notably with the personage of the wet-nurse. Infants of the upper classes were routinely separated from their mothers after birth and sent out to wet-nurses, where they spent, on average, the first eighteen months to two years of life. Thus, as we shall see, Leontes taunts Hermione by declaring himself glad that she did not nurse their son, the prince. In some wealthy families the nurse became a permanent member of the household, remaining on as the child’s friend and confidant after the weaning process had been completed. Juliet’s Nurse is one such figure, demonstrably closer to her charge than are the elder Capulets. We hear of her own daughter Susan, now dead, who was born at the same time as Juliet, and of Juliet’s weaning eleven years ago (at the age of three!), when she tasted wormwood on the Nurse’s nipple, and proceeded to ‘fall out with the dug’ (I. iii. 32). It is not clear whether Marina’s nurse Lychorida is a wet-nurse, but she is manifestly the strongest personal influence on Marina from birth to puberty, since Pericles, believing his wife dead, has placed his infant daughter into the care of foster parents, the King and Queen of Tharsus. Euriphile, the nurse of Cymbeline’s sons, stole them from the king at the behest of the aggrieved Belarius, and the young men grew to manhood regarding the couple as their natural parents; so also Perdita believes herself the child of the shepherd and his wife. In fact, one psychological outgrowth of the practice of wet-nursing was a not infrequent identity crisis on the part of many adults, as reflected in the popular changeling fairy tales of the period. It was perhaps natural to imagine that a wet-nurse whose wealthy charge had died might substitute a child of her own for the missing infant, so as to avoid punishment.⁸

Nor were the children of the period permitted much more access to their parents as they grew older. The practice of ‘fostering out’, whereby young people left the home at an early age – about ten – for school or work elsewhere, was extremely common in the sixteenth century. Among its other effects, fostering out led to a concept of adolescence (or ‘youth’) as a separate stage of human development between sexual maturity in the teen years and marriage in the middle twenties. Lawrence Stone nicely observes that the shepherd in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale ‘must have struck a familiar chord when he remarked, “I would there were no age between sixteen and twenty-three, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” ’⁹ To this category of ‘youth’ we may assign the young bloods who travel with Romeo, as well as Prince Hal’s tavern friends, and, allowing for some difference in class, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – perhaps even Laertes. It may be noticed that this list of ‘youth’ is composed almost exclusively of secondary characters; if Romeo and Hal and Hamlet are adolescents, they are so in a very special sense, and their progress toward adulthood is deliberately played off against that of their peers. But the very device of ‘playing off’ is made possible, in part, by the existence of historical norms and historical practices, familiar to the audience, against which the playwright could counterpoise his characters and his plot.

The concept of ‘youth’ as the shepherd describes it did not, of course, apply to the young women of the period, although typically they too passed a considerable time between the onset of puberty and the entry into marriage – if indeed they married at all. From the thirteenth through the early sixteenth century, when English nunneries flourished, it was not uncommon for fathers to pledge their daughters to the religious life in order to avoid the expense of a large dowry.¹⁰ The situation of Hermia, forced to choose between an arranged marriage and the cloister, is likewise certainly not without precedent in fact. Yet the suppression of Catholicism and the abolition of the nunneries in England, while greatly increasing the number of women who married, rather constricted than expanded the options open to them. Before the Reformation a well-born woman ambitious of personal power often found the freedom she sought rather as the head of a nunnery than as a wife, however important her husband – nor did the rigors of convent life apparently prevent her from indulging a taste for personal luxuries.¹¹ Unlike the case of Shakespeare’s deliberately reclusive nuns, such as Emilia in The Comedy of Errors, the convent for some of these women was a way of entering the world even as they were by convention dead to it.

But with the coming of the Protestant ascendancy a new emphasis was placed upon the wife’s duty and subjection to her husband, and upon the ‘feminine’ domestic arts. It is true that during the central decades of the sixteenth century a brief movement toward classical education for women was given impetus by such humanists as Vives and Erasmus. Queen Elizabeth was herself one of the women affected by this trend. She spoke fluent Latin, Greek, French and Italian, and could boast to Essex of confounding an impertinent Polish ambassador with extempore remarks in Latin – a tongue which had ‘lain long rusting’ since her schooldays.¹² As late as 1580 Richard Mulcaster still endorsed the idea of women’s education, writing in praise of the many women in the country ‘so excellently well trained and so rarely qualified in regard both to the tongues themselves and to the subject-matter contained in them’.¹³ But even as he wrote, education in the classics was being replaced by a return to the traditional courtly graces: the needlework in which we find Hermia, Helena and Marina so well skilled, the ‘music, instruments and poetry’ which delight the docile Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (I. i. 92), and the dancing so deftly performed by the ladies of Love’s Labor’s Lost. The older, more ‘masculine’ model would perhaps have been more to the taste of other Shakespearean women, like Beatrice, Portia and Kate. But pressures from Protestant clergymen strongly urged a return to the concept of docility in women and wives. Luther’s view that women should mind the house and bring up the children was echoed and supported by Protestant theologians and lay persons throughout England. The Homily on Marriage, which was to be read out periodically in all Anglican churches from 1562 onwards, plainly asserted the inferiority of women:

The woman is a weak creature not endued with like strength and constancy of mind; therefore, they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be; and lighter they be, and more vain in their fantasies and opinions.¹⁴

Still, there was a woman on the throne, and clergymen, like poets and playwrights, were well advised to walk carefully. Bishop Aylmer, in a sermon before Elizabeth, spoke of two kinds of women, some ‘wiser, better learned, discreeter, and more constant than a number of men’, the others ‘fond, foolish, wanton, flibbergibs, tattlers, triflers, wavering, witless, without council, feeble, careless, rash, proud, dainty, tale-bearers, eavesdroppers, rumour-raisers, evil-tongued, worse-minded, and in everyway doltified by the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’.¹⁵ Whether Gloriana was mollified by this politic distinction is not certain. Without doubt, however, the situation of the Virgin Queen created special problems. On the one hand, women were almost universally thought to be inferior, unworthy of holding property, in law and theology alike subjugated to the will of their husbands, basically valuable for the dowries they brought with them and the children they produced. On the other hand, the sovereign was not only a woman but an unmarried woman, without husband or heirs. One member of Parliament in 1559 spoke for them all when he opined that ‘nothing can be more contrary to the public respects than that of the Princess, in whose marriage is comprehended the safety and peace of the Commonwealth, should live unmarried, and as it were a Vestal Virgin’.¹⁶

Elizabeth herself was not unmindful of this conventual parallel. At one point, early in the reign, she dramatically drew her coronation ring from her finger and held it aloft to declare herself England’s nun: ‘behold the pledge of this my wedlock and marriage with my Kingdom’.¹⁷ Certainly she was as aware as any medieval abbess that her power in some ways derived from her single state – that to marry would inevitably be to subjugate herself to both a husband and a king. Nor could she have forgotten the fate of her mother or that of her father’s other wives, forced to surrender not only autonomy but sometimes life itself in Henry’s relentless quest for a male heir to his throne. Elizabeth’s repeated assertions that she preferred a virgin life were almost surely colored by politics as well as by personal preference,¹⁸ but whatever the reason she elected not to marry, her rhetoric of virginity remained to be dealt with by her citizens and courtiers – side by side with her lifelong taste for flirtation and courtship. Throughout her long career Elizabeth remained a paradox for her times, the foremost of Knox’s ‘monstrous regiment of women’ – a keenly intelligent, highly educated, strong-minded, single woman, ruling England absolutely, submissive only to God.

Yet despite the dazzling example of the Virgin Queen, the philosophers and the theologians of the age were turning away from the medieval ideal of chastity and toward the concept of ‘holy matrimony’, marriage as a condition decidedly preferable to the celibate life of the cloister. In 1523 Erasmus had written that lifelong virginity was a flower which ‘hathe her bryghte beautye, her fayre fragrancy, her grace and dignities in this world’¹⁹ – incorporating the priest, monk or nun into the mainstream of life. However, a hundred years later the tide had shifted. Cardinal Bellarmine still held to the Pauline view that marriage was for those who could not resist the weakness of the flesh: ‘marriage is a thing humane, virginity is angelical’.²⁰ But the celebrated Protestant preacher William Perkins took a different stance: marriage, he asserted, was ‘a state in itself far more excellent than the condition of a single life’.²¹ In 1549 Archbishop Cranmer had added to his new Prayer Book a third motive for marriage, joining it to the ancient purposes of avoiding fornication and bearing legitimate children; now ‘mutual society, help and comfort’ was also deemed an acceptable reason to marry. The idea of ‘holy matrimony’ was coupled with that of ‘matrimonial chastity’, moderation of sexual passion within marriage – a phrase that sounds curiously like the problematic ‘married chastity’ of Shakespeare’s Phoenix and Turtle, which resulted in their ‘leaving no posterity’. (P&T 59–61). What ‘matrimonial chastity’ and ‘holy matrimony’ meant for the development of social institutions in England was an inevitable clash between the old practice of arranged marriages and strict filial obedience, and the new doctrine, encouraged by Protestant theologians, of personal choice in wedlock. Lust was as unacceptable in marriage as out of it, but the claims of affection and preference were growing stronger. In the later seventeenth century the cause would be taken up by numbers of prominent Protestants and Puritans; Jeremy Taylor would compare marital love to the purity of light and the sacredness of a temple, and Milton would claim that the chief purpose of marriage was neither procreation nor civil order, but ‘the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the solitary life’.²²

*

For Shakespeare, himself coming of age as a dramatist in this period of consolidation and change, the prevailing beliefs of the time about marriage, virginity, chastity and child-rearing were essential materials for his art. In the history plays he deals vividly with the question of marriages arranged for political purposes and personal gain. The surrogate wooing of Suffolk, the cynical marital politics of Richard III, and Henry V’s moving attempt to express his love for Katherine as a personal need over and above the needs of the state – all these are placed against the background of historical custom. The deep affection between Richard II and his queen is yet another evidence of Richard’s primary identity as a private person rather than a public monarch – and it is useful to remember here that Shakespeare changed history in order to make the queen a grown woman. Laertes’ assertion to Ophelia that Hamlet is a prince, and therefore ‘may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself’ (Ham. I. iii. 19–20) touches upon the same theme, as (on the level of the squirearchy) do A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Othello. The figure of the tyrant father, defender of patriarchy and patrimony, is everywhere in his work, from Egeus to Shylock.

Yet Shakespeare was by no means, of course, merely the creature of his time. In comedies, tragedies and histories alike, he describes love in affective terms which for the most part go beyond even the courtly expectations of romantic love. As we shall see, his characters are often vividly aware of their own sexuality. His women, in particular, are frequently outspoken about their sexual feelings, as well as about the quality of their love. Certainly they are not the tattlers and triflers of Bishop Aylmer’s diatribe; rather, time and again, they show themselves wiser and more capable than their lovers and husbands. In short, much as we should expect, Shakespeare uses the beliefs and practices of the world around him to inform his own dramatic vision, not as a copyist but as an interpreter, making of social custom a thematic instrument to reveal the nature of his characters and their situations.

The rites of passage which demarcate sexual growth to maturity are explored in the plays in considerable detail, in terms which are at some times literal, at others metaphorical or emblematic. To observe them more closely, it will therefore be useful to divide our topic into three phases: sexual self-knowledge as manifested in attitudes towards virginity, chastity and sexuality; actual rites, like marriage, defloration, child-bearing and nursing; and symbolic or metaphorical representations of sexual themes.

II

In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus cautions Hermia to consider her choices carefully: if she does not marry Demetrius, she must either die, or ‘abjure / Forever the society of men’.

Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires;

Know of your youth, examine well your blood,

Whether, if you yield not to your father’s choice,

You can endure the livery of a nun,

For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,

To live a barren sister all your life,

Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.

Thrice-blessèd they that master so their blood.

To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;

But earthlier happy is the rose distilled,

Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,

Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

(I. i. 65–78)

Despite his perfunctory praise for the ‘blessed’ condition of virginity, Theseus – himself shortly to become a bridegroom – clearly regards a life of cloistered celibacy as not very different from the alternative punishment of death. His choice of words – ‘endure’, ‘barren’, ‘faint’, ‘cold’, ‘fruitless’, ‘withering’ – creates a vivid picture of denial and consequent deterioration. By contrast the rose is ‘earthlier happy’ because it is distilled, transmuted to a perfume which lingers and gives pleasure.

In fact, cloisters, monasteries and nunneries in the plays are not seen as productive parts of ‘this world’ at all. We have already noted that the abbesses in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles both emerge from seclusion to resume their social roles as wives and mothers, and that Hamlet’s injunction to Ophelia to ‘get thee to a nunnery’ underscores Ophelia’s persistent refusal of adult responsibility. In a similar way Friar Lawrence proves an unfit counsellor for Romeo and Juliet precisely because of his unworldliness, his lack of experience. His bromidic advice to ‘love moderately’ is wholly at odds with the precipitousness of their youthful passion and its language of lightning and excess. Moreover, when pressed by circumstances, he forgets his own conviction that ‘They stumble that run fast’ (II. iii. 94) and intervenes with unwonted haste – performing the secret marriage, administering the sleeping potion, posting a letter to Romeo that is never delivered, and finally stumbling himself, both literally and figuratively, in the graveyard. Though he is pardoned by the Prince of Verona-on the grounds that ‘We still [i.e. always] have known thee for a holy man’ (V. iii. 271) – this holy unworldliness is precisely his problem, and his naive attempt to apply the sententiae of the cell to the world of love and action is in large measure responsible for the play’s tragic outcome.

A complementary pattern is exemplified by the duke in Measure for Measure, himself very much a man of ‘this world’, who takes on the fictive identity of ‘Friar Lodowick’ to observe and control corruption in Vienna. Lucio’s description of him as a ‘meddling friar’ (V. i. 127) fits Friar Lawrence as aptly as Friar Lodowick, but the duke’s manipulations are founded in a wiser and less absolute understanding of human nature. Both friars attempt to direct the course of events in the plays of which they bear a part – indeed, the duke has often been compared to a playwright, as well as to God. Structurally, Friar Lawrence’s devices might merit the same comparison, except for the important fact that his plans inevitably miscarry, leading at last not to ‘wedding cheer’ but to a ‘sad burial feast’ (R&J IV. v. 87). The functional distinction between the two men is pre-eminently that of experience in the world. Like Emilia and Thaisa, the duke enters his monastery as a temporary refuge, and emerges from it at the play’s end to preside over several marriages, including – perhaps – his own.

Together with All’s Well, Measure for Measure probably stands as the most direct Shakespearean exploration of the psychological effects of celibacy. In that play Angelo, a self-declared Puritan, reveals himself as a sensualist and ‘virgin-violator’ (V. i.41), while Isabella, who is about to enter a convent, can utter the chilling sentiment that ‘More than our brother is our chastity’ (11. iv. 184) at the same time that she describes the loss of virginity in terms both sexual and pathological:

Th’ impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies,

And strip myself to death as to a bed

That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield

My body up to shame.

(II. iv. 100–3)

For both Angelo and Isabella, virginity has itself become a mode of excess, as dangerous in its way as the licentiousness of Lucio, and much more damaging to personal development than the sin of impregnation for which Claudio lies under sentence of death. Isabella, too, is under sentence – a self-imposed one – for she is denying the very process of growth and life. The scene (I. iv.) in which Lucio tells her of her brother’s sentence adroitly juxtaposes her uncompromising view with its polar opposite. For Isabella has chosen the order of St Clare, a sisterhood noted for its strictness – and she would prefer a yet ‘more strict restraint’ (4). Here again her attitude toward the virgin life is one of almost self-indulgent excess. Only because she is as yet unsworn is she permitted to speak to Lucio and receive his message – a message couched in lyrical and sensuous terms sharply at odds with the spare diction of the rest of the scene, and indeed the rest of the play. This is one of those passages in which the poet Shakespeare seems to speak through (instead of in) his character, for the language is not really appropriate to Lucio; rather, its presence in the scene seems a clear controversion of the ‘strict restraint’ Isabella would impose upon life and speech:

Your brother and his lover have embraced;

As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time

That from the seedness the bare fallow brings

To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb

Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.

(40–4)

The prolific agricultural metaphor, the richness of descriptive detail, even the double meaning of ‘husbandry’ here emphasize the fruitful and productive value of sexuality and child-bearing. We may recall Theseus’ contrasting language of fruitlessness in discussing the life of a ‘barren sister’ – as well as Isabella’s own call for restraint. When, shortly thereafter, Lucio characterizes Lord Angelo as ‘a man whose blood / Is very snow-broth’ (57–8), the contrast of seasons and temperaments is even more clearly drawn.

As we have seen, Isabella’s metaphorical identification of Juliet as her ‘cousin’ serves to emphasize the contrast between the two young women. Where once they were virtually interchangeable, another set of Shakespearean twins, one ‘cousin’ is now entering a convent, the other bearing a child. Later in the play, the appearance of Mariana as a medial figure will help to fill out the continuum of women’s roles. Isabella refuses sexuality and thus denies life both to herself and to her brother; Mariana, a virgin when the play begins, sleeps with Angelo and consummates their marriage, postponed when her own brother died and lost her dowry at sea; Juliet fulfills the promise of marriage in her pregnancy, and asserts to the duke that the act of love was ‘mutually committed’ (II. iii. 27), the responsibility of both lovers equally. She thus associates herself with those other Shakespearean women (like her namesake Juliet and like Desdemona) who actively declare their own sexual identities and desires.

It may be well at this point to emphasize that the representation of virginity in Shakespeare’s plays is by no means entirely negative. Prospero’s concern that Ferdinand not ‘break [Miranda’s] virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies’ (IV. i. 15–16) is represented as both natural and appropriate, the king in All’s Well That Ends Well promises Diana a husband ‘If thou be’st yet a fresh uncroppèd flower’ (V. iii. 326), and Marina is able to transform the clients of a brothel into men who prefer to hear the vestals sing. All three of these women are virgins – but all will also shortly be brides. It is when the condition of virginity becomes a stasis rather than a stage that the plays invite us to regard it with a disapproving eye. Spenser’s Britomart is a militant virgin, whose power derives in part from her virginity, although she too progresses toward marriage. In Shakespeare’s plays the only militant virgins are Isabella, in whom the desire for lifelong celibacy is represented as almost pathological, and Joan La Pucelle, who as she approaches the stake declares that she is pregnant – whether by the Dauphin, or the King of Naples, or the Duke of Alençon. Marina comes as close as any Shakespearean woman to the ideal of the virgin endowed by her condition with special powers, and indeed I think we never quite find her betrothal to Lysimachus believable. However, the romance genre of Pericles, and in particular the play’s stress on a virtuous love between father and daughter contrasting with the incestuous passion of Antiochus, help to set her aside as a special case outside the general pattern.

In general, then, those Shakespearean characters who adopt a rule of celibacy in adulthood do so in defiance – or ignorance – of their own natures. The lords in Love’s Labor’s Lost proudly swear to ‘war against [their] own affections / And the huge army of the world’s desires’ (I. i. 9–10) – and at once fall most inconveniently in love. Their ‘little academe’ is a secularized version of the monastery, even less admirable because it is dedicated not to the worship of God but to their own vain quest for fame. The stylized courtship and covert sonneteering to which these lords are reduced is neatly counterpointed by Costard’s overtly sexual interest in the wench Jaquenetta and his artless defense of natural sexuality: ‘Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh’ (I. i. 216–17). In this respect, the character of Costard, though much more attractive, looks forward to the plain-spoken advocates of sexual freedom in the dark comedies: Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure, who advises Escalus that young men ‘will to’t’ unless ‘your worship mean[sl to geld and splay all the youth of the city’ (II. i. 228–31), and Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well.

In fact, the most extended argument against virginity in the plays is offered by the frankly unamiable figure of Parolles, who is rightly described by Helena as a liar, a fool and a coward. But in his own way Parolles is one of Shakespeare’s realists, a figure akin to Emilia in Othello and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra; as he says, simply the thing he is shall make him live. His voice provides a necessary counterpoint to the romantic idealism of both Helena and Bertram, as for example when, having inquired whether Helena is ‘meditating on virginity’, he offers a meditation of his own:

Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost.… ‘Tis too cold a companion.… There’s little can be said in’t; ‘tis against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity, is to accuse your mothers.… Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love.… Off with ‘t while ‘tis vendible … your old virginity is like one of our French withered pears: it looks ill, it eats drily; marry, ‘tis a withered pear.

(I. i. 130–65)

What is missing from this dispassionate summary is, of course, any sense that sexual relationships are founded on idealism and love, and Helena quite properly responds with a spirited defense of her particular love for Bertram, to whom she wishes to be ‘a mother, and a mistress, and a friend … a guide, a goddess, and a sovereign’ (169–71).

While Parolles is advocating license, his appraisal of virginity has striking affinities with other, more sympathetically expressed sentiments on the subject elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, he shares with Theseus the view that virginity is ‘cold’ and ‘withered’ – a life-denying state – though he omits the balancing praise of marriage essential to Theseus’ speech. His materialistic injunction, ‘Off with’t while ‘tis vendible’, which reduces love to a commodity, at the same time calls to mind Rosalind’s much more appealing – but equally unromantic-admonition to the love-struck Phebe: ‘Sell when you can, you are not for all markets’ (AYLI III. v. 60). And his association of virginity with pride and self-love is exemplified in Twelfth Night by both the self-cloistered Olivia and the Puritan Malvolio. Parolles’ speech confirms the audience’s sense that he, like Pompey in Measure for Measure, is a severely limited human being, but his pronouncement that virginity is ‘against the rule of nature’ is nowhere contradicted in Shakespeare’s works. Even the churlish hero of Venus and Adonis, who disdains ‘sweating lust’ and the determined advances of the goddess of love herself, is held up in comic contrast to his more amorous and self-knowledgeable – and in this way more human – horse.

Adonis may be assumed to be a virgin in the same sense as Isabella; indeed, his protestations are amusing in part because, in defiance of the usual sexual stereotype, he seems to be defending his virtue, while Venus offers the habitual carpe diem arguments of the male seducer (ll. 745–68). As a rule, however, refusals of sexuality (and consequently of adulthood) in Shakespeare are divided, as we should expect, along lines of gender, women (like Isabella) protesting against the loss of literal virginity, men (like the Navarrese lords) imposing upon themselves an unnatural abstinence. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia resists Lysander’s invitation to lie beside him in the wood, though he protests that his intentions are honorable:

gentle friend, for love and courtesy

Lie further off, in human modesty.

Such separation as may well be said

Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid,

So far be distant.

(II. ii. 56–60)

This decision has important dramatic consequences: Lysander’s eyes are anointed by Puck, who reads the separation of the pair, not unnaturally, as a sign of his indifference to her: ‘She durst not lie / Near this lack-love, this kill-courtesy’ (76–7). As a result, he wakes to declare his allegiance to the first woman he sees, who happens to be Helena. Hermia then awakens alone, remembering with terror a dream in which she is attacked by a snake, while Lysander sits by and smiles – a dream which seems very like a metaphor for her sexual fears. Hermia’s prudery is in striking contrast to the active and energetic quest for love by Helena, whom Demetrius upbraids for her boldness:

You do impeach your modesty too much,

To leave the city, and commit yourself

Into the hands of one that loves you not,

To trust the opportunity of night

And the ill counsel of a desert place

With the rich worth of your virginity.

(II. i. 214–19)

Helena’s instant reply, ‘Your virtue is my privilege’ (220), is a direct inversion of Hermia’s response to Lysander, and suggests a distinction between the two women which is borne out by the development of the plot. From this point Helena’s fortunes will rise and Hermia’s fall, until Hermia too realizes something of the pain and risk which are intrinsic to love. The elopement into the wood is not enough; only through solitude is Hermia forced to confront her emerging identity as a lover – and as a woman. In a play which begins and ends with reminders of sexual eagerness – ‘how slow / This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires’ (I. i. 3–4); ‘to wear away this long age of three hours / Between our aftersupper and bedtime’ (V. i. 33–4) – acceptance of the sexual aspects of love is an essential prerequisite for successful adulthood and marriage.

A timidity similar to Hermia’s appears to afflict Hero in Much Ado about Nothing. Hero’s submissiveness to her father is made clear early in the play, when he tells her of Don Pedro’s supposed suit for her hand and apparently receives her consent; after the error is discovered and corrected, she is equally willing to wed Claudio. Yet on the eve of her wedding she displays a real reluctance even to talk about sex and lovemaking. Margaret’s jests about being ‘heavier soon by the weight of a man’ (III. iv. 26) are met only by ‘Fie upon thee! Art not ashamed?’ (27), and the audience must feel some sympathy for Margaret’s ensuing defense of marriage – sex and all – as an ‘honorable’ estate. We may think that Hero pays an excessively great price for the small vices of prudery and passivity, but the pattern she follows here is a familiar one, differentiating her in crucial ways from those bolder female spirits who defy their fathers’ wishes and express a positive wish for sexual fulfillment.

For male characters facing similar problems of sexual self-knowledge the consequences can be even more acute, since they typically respond not with passivity but with precipitous and ill-conceived action. In the case of Othello, marriage comes before the confrontation with sexual desire, with disastrous results. Like Coriolanus, Othello has come of age in war without pausing to learn the nature of love; his explanation of how he came to care for Desdemona is ominously expressed in terms of hero worship:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

(I. iii. 166–7)

This is not at all how Desdemona sees their relationship; she ‘saw Othello’s visage in his mind,’ she says, and she ‘love[s] the Moor to live with him’ (247, 243), as an equal and a sexual partner, not an admiring audience: ‘if I be left behind, / A moth of peace, and he go to the war, / The rites for why I love him are bereft me’ (250–2). Yet the consummation of the marriage is repeatedly deferred. There is a bitter irony in Iago’s spate of sexual images – ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ (I. i. 85–6); ‘your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs’ (112–14); gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’ (123) – for twice we see Othello roused from his nuptial bed to attend upon state business; once in Venice, in the council chamber, and a second time at Cyprus. Even there, though Iago informs us that ‘he hath not yet made wanton the night with her’ (II. iii. 15–16), he leaves Desdemona’s bed to silence the brawling troops: “tis the soldiers’ life’, he tells her, ‘To have their balmy slumbers waked with strife’ (255–6). Moreover, he goes out of his way to insist that his feelings for her are not carnal, assuring the duke that he wants her company in Cyprus

not

To please the palate of my appetite,

Nor to comply with heat – the young affects

In me defunct – and proper satisfaction;

But to be free and bounteous to her mind.

(I. iii. 256–60)

The general, we may think, protests too much. In his attempt to be more civilized even than the native Venetians, Othello denies his own sexual nature: ‘The tyrant Custom, most grave senators, / Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down’ (226–8). Once again we may compare this to Desdemona’s frank acknowledgment of ‘the rites for why I love him’. Othello’s fall, when it comes, is a direct consequence of his denial of the primacy of love, both emotionally and sexually. That he can believe Desdemona unfaithful to him on the slightest of hints from Iago – indeed, that he trusts his ancient more than his wife – derives in large part from his resolute rejection of the claims of private life. Convinced at last of his wife’s infidelity, he laments that ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ (III. iii. 354) – his occupation, not his marriage. Everything is referred to the world of war, until the violence of his repressed sexual feelings takes the displaced form of murder. Significantly, the supposed ‘proof’ of Desdemona’s guilt is the handkerchief spotted with strawberries, which becomes in Othello’s mind an unconscious but powerful metaphor for the wedding sheets stained with hymeneal blood. Cassio possesses the handkerchief – therefore, Cassio must have possessed his wife. The wedding sheets themselves, placed on the bed at Desdemona’s request, are finally stained not by love but by death, as Othello vows his revenge: Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted’ (V. i. 36). The confusion of sexual and martial impulses which has characterized him from the beginning is nowhere more tragically evident than in this final scene, when, the ‘cold’ and ‘chaste’ Desdemona lying dead before him, Othello can declare, with bitter bravado, ‘Behold, I have a weapon; / A better never did itself sustain / Upon a soldier’s thigh’ (V. ii. 259–61). His refusal to accept his own sexual feelings and to acknowledge the place of sexuality in human life lies at the root of his tragedy.

When a similar situation occurs in a romantic comedy, the outcome is predictably less serious, but tragic possibilities are never far away. Count Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, though described by a jealous rival as – like Cassio – a ‘most exquisite’ Florentine, also exhibits, oddly enough, certain resemblances to Othello. He has distinguished himself in war ‘beyond the promise of his age’ (I. i. 13), and, partly in consequence, he has no experience in love. Before the recent war, he says, he ‘looked upon [Hero] with a soldier’s eye, / That liked, but had a rougher task in hand / Than to drive liking to the name of love’ (I. i. 291–3). When he turns his mind to courtship, he is at first uncertain of his own success, seeking an intermediary to plead his suit. Most ominously, he shows a willingness to part from his wife immediately after the wedding. When his commander, Don Pedro, declares his intention to stay only ‘until the marriage be consummate’, Claudio immediately offers to accompany him to Aragon, and is reproved: ‘Nay, that would be as great a soil in the new gloss of your marriage as to show a child his new coat and forbid him to wear it’ (III. ii. 5–7). The simile echoes Juliet’s affirmation of sexual longing:

                          So tedious is this day

As is the night before some festival

To an impatient child that hath new robes

And may not wear them.

(R&J III. ii. 28–31)

But where Juliet breaks the bounds of modesty to acknowledge her desires, Claudio, like Othello, represses them in a show of civility, subjugating personal to public motives. It is not entirely surprising, then, that like Othello he is easily persuaded of his bride’s guilt. Again, the situation in the two plays is structurally similar: where Iago had led Othello to a place from which he could see – and misinterpret – a meeting between Cassio and Desdemona, the Iago-like Don John leads Claudio to the orchard to observe what appears to be a clandestine meeting between Hero and another man. The device of a waiting woman dressed in Hero’s clothes is successfully deceptive, and Claudio publicly denounces Hero at the altar:

Would you not swear,

All you that see her, that she were a maid,

By these exterior shows? But she is none.

She knows the heat of a luxurious bed;

Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

(IV. i. 37–41)

Hero is a ‘rotten orange’ (31), fair to look upon, but diseased within. Her subsequent swoon and apparent death, like the death of Desdemona – and the later swoon and ‘death’ of Hermione – symbolically replace and displace the sexual ‘death’ which should have consummated her marriage. Accused of ‘dying’ falsely with a lover she must, in the Friar’s words, ‘die to live’ (252), or else face the familiar alternative of banishment to ‘some reclusive and religious life’ (241). Claudio’s education in the nature of love, to the extent that it takes place, is a result of serendipity (the watch has overheard the conspirators) and belated contrition (having killed Hero, he consents to wed her ‘cousin’, whom he has never seen), rather than a real growth in character; but his willingness to undertake a marriage on faith (‘I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope’ – V. iv. 38) is at least the outward sign of an intimated change. Within the play’s comic framework his accusation of Hero has indeed been much ado about nothing, and is easily undone; but the play’s title might serve with equal appropriateness as a subtitle for Othello, where a failure to accept and understand sexuality converts ‘trifles light as air’ into proofs of sin and a rationale for murder.

As we have begun to see, for Shakespeare’s characters a rejection of sexuality or a denial of its importance can often signal the presence of other serious flaws or failures in self-knowledge. There are, however, occasions in which such behavior is part of a fundamentally sound convention – when it is acknowledged as a stage in human development, rather than asserted as the ultimate ideal of conduct. Romantic lovers in the plays, for example, often include a declaration of their chaste desires as a necessary prelude to marriage. Thus Florizel compares himself favorably to those gods who have transformed themselves for love: ‘since my desires / Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts / Burn hotter than my faith’ (WT IV. iv. 33–5). Similarly, Ferdinand assures Prospero that

the strong’st suggestion

Our worser genius can, shall never melt

Mine honor into lust, to take away

The edge of that day’s celebration

When I shall think or Phoebus’ steeds are foundered

Or Night kept chained below.

(Tmp. IV. i. 26–31)

The masque presented to the lovers, while it includes both Juno, the goddess of marriage, and Ceres, the patroness of fertility, contains only a scathing reference to Venus and Cupid, who are described as intending ‘some wanton charm upon this man and maid’ (95) to make them break their chaste vows. This propriety of behavior is certainly approved, rather than condemned, in the plays, but there is evidence that Shakespeare wished to balance the picture. The masque of Juno and Ceres is interrupted by Prospero’s remembrance of Caliban and his plot – and Caliban is, of course, the play’s one unmistakable figure of lust, who (like Ferdinand) desires Miranda, and ‘didst seek to violate / The honor of [Prospero’s] child’ (I. ii. 349–50). In the same way, Florizel’s respectful disavowal of lust is complemented almost immediately by the arrival of Autolycus and his bawdy ballads. In The Winter’s Tale the pre-nuptial event is a sheepshearing feast rather than a pageant, but in both ceremonies – as in both plays – the effect is the same: the young suitor, virtuously praising restraint, is reminded at the moment of his betrothal of the power and importance of sexual energy. Passing from bachelorhood to marriage, he is made to recognize the complexity of an adult relationship between man and woman. In these two plays, interestingly, the emblem of sexuality is a fantastic and symbolic figure – Caliban, Autolycus – who differs in kind from the more realistically drawn lovers; as a result, emphasis is placed upon the human dilemma of the initiate, the youth on the threshold of maturity.

When similar figures appear in other plays, providing an emblematic infusion of sexual energy, they tend likewise to be privileged, if not by nature then by class or occupation, and thus to offer a counterpoint to the human drama of choice. Costard and Pompey are both lower-class figures, who may speak with freedom and frankness of hearkening after the flesh. The fairy queen Titania and the ass-headed Bottom (whose elongated ears and nose suggest corresponding endowments of a sexual nature) each come from a world apart from that of the Athenian court. Theirs is the only amorous relationship in the play that does not lead to marriage, and it clearly represents lust. In this case reason and love keep no company at all, for as Puck points out, ‘My mistress with a monster is in love’ (MND III. ii. 6).

In As You Like It, another play in which pairs of lovers contrast vividly with one another in their attitudes toward love, the irruptive element of sexual energy is provided by Touchstone, who ‘press[es] in … among the rest of the country copulatives, to swear and forswear, according as marriage binds and blood breaks’ (V. iv. 56–8). Without Touchstone and his Audrey – whose name, as he reminds us, rhymes so easily with bawdry – the dialogue of love in the play would tend, despite Rosalind’s realism, toward the merely literary and the overromantic. One reason Rosalind retains her disguise in the wood once she has found Orlando is surely to educate Orlando in the complexities of love, and guide him away from the hackneyed Petrarchan practice of hanging poems on trees. But if Orlando is too literary, Silvius and Phebe are too romantic – comic star-crossed shepherd lovers whose rhetoric is as hyperbolic as their self-knowledge is limited. Touchstone, with his insistence that shepherds earn their livelihood not by writing poems but by the copulation of cattle, ‘betray [ing] a she-lamb of a twelve-month to a crookèd-pated old cuckoldly ram, out of all reasonable match’ (III. ii. 79–82), is a constant and necessary corrective to the prevailing tone. ‘Will you be married, motley?’ asks the solitary Jaques, and Touchstone’s reply is once again a reminder of Costard:

As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.

(III. iii. 77–81)

‘We must be married, or we must live in bawdry’ (95). Once again a privileged speaker asserts the importance of sexuality in human love. Touchstone’s exaggerated insistence on the centrality of sex (like the similar extremes represented by Auto-lycus and Caliban) helps to balance the romanticism of the other lovers, and provides both for them, and for the audience in the theater, a more mature and self-knowledgeable view of marriage.

Moreover, the situation of Phebe in the same play offers yet another kind of corrective, for Phebe’s infatuation with Ganymede-Rosalind is not only blind but also by definition fruitless. This misdirection of sexual desire, doting on a disguised member of one’s own sex, is often used by Shakespeare as an indication of self-indulgence and consequent immaturity in love. Rosalind instructs Phebe in no uncertain terms, ‘mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees, / And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’ (III. v. 57–8). Yet Phebe’s transfer of affections from the illusory ‘Ganymede’ to the importunate Silvius is stylized at best, occurring only as a result of Rosalind’s last-minute self-revelation: ‘If sight and shape be true, / Why then, my love adieu!’ (V. iv. 120–1). Her error of judgment is a metaphorical commentary on Orlando’s partial blindness, rather than a focal point of actual growth and change.

In Twelfth Night, however, a greater emphasis is placed upon the substitution of an appropriate love object for an impossible one. When we first hear of Olivia we are told that she has sequestered herself away from the world for a period of seven years:

   like a cloistress she will veilèd walk,

And water once a day her chamber round

With eye-offending brine: all this to season

A brother’s dead love.

(I. i. 29–32)

The words ‘season’ and ‘brine’ here suggest that Olivia wishes to preserve and prolong, rather than to pass through, her feeling of grief. Characteristically, Orsino admires rather than deplores this self-annihilating behavior, intending to build upon her filial affection and fashion out of it a love for himself. But it quickly becomes clear that both are principally enamored of themselves. Olivia’s subsequent infatuation with the supposed ‘Cesario’ thus represents a considerable step in the right direction – that is, away from the safe and childlike identification with a sibling and an equally childlike narcissism. Yet her choice of a woman in disguise suggests that this first stage, of personal risk and unaccustomed openness, must for her be only transitional. In essence she progresses from the self-love and self-pity of an Isabella to the sisterly love of Rosalind and Celia; like Celia accompanying Rosalind into the forest, she will learn first to risk, and then to love. The substitution of Sebastian for Viola, which is often criticized as unacceptable dramatic opportunism, is prepared for by the sequence of Olivia’s development, and may perhaps be usefully compared to the lightning transformations in some fairy tales. Just as learning to love a tame bear prepares Snow-White (in ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red’) to love the Prince who has been imprisoned in that form, so learning to love the energetic but indubitably feminine Viola allows Olivia to develop as a woman, until she is ready to meet her husband in Sebastian. Both Phebe and Olivia take refuge, initially, in traditional female postures of sexual avoidance: Phebe as an unattainable (though slightly déclassé) Petrarchan beloved, Olivia as a kind of secular nun. Their choice of false or intermediary objects of desire represents the middle stage in a progression from autoerotic to homoerotic and thence to fully adult, heterosexual, erotic identity. It may be useful here to call to mind Freud’s observations on the sexual theories of children, in which he cites the first false (but suggestive) theory commonly held by them as a ‘neglect of the differences between the sexes’.²³ In an Elizabethan theater in which all women’s parts were played by men, this gender distinction would be even more complex, since Olivia’s task is to single out the man-playing-a-woman-playing-a-man from the men-playing-men. Sebastian neatly summarizes the result of her experiences when at last the truth is disclosed:

So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.

But nature to her bias drew in that.

You would have been contracted to a maid;

Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived:

You are betrothed both to a maid and man.

(V. i. 258–62)

Not only Nature, the goddess, but human nature as well has led to Olivia’s maturation. She will never be as self-knowledgeable as Viola – but then Orsino will never reach the human wisdom of Sebastian. Shakespeare’s concern is not to indicate a single plateau of perfection – neither Phebe nor Audrey will ever rival Rosalind – but rather to suggest a pattern of progress toward maturity.

III

When we shift the focus of our attention from sexual awareness and acceptance to actual sexual behavior, or, in other words, from ‘rights’ to ‘rites’, we can see that the sexual rites undergone by women in the plays span the entire sequence of marriage acts : from initiation and defloration, through pregnancy, childbearing and nursing. The act of defloration itself is not often commented upon, for reasons which may relate as much to dramatic feasibility and to delicacy as to the playwright’s degree of interest. We do have the two aubade scenes, one in Romeo and Juliet, the other in Troilus and Cressida; in both the lovers are seen together immediately after a night of love-making, having been aided in the secrecy of their arrangements (and teased for their eagerness) by the very similar figures of the Nurse and Pandarus. In each case the song of the morning lark is heard and noted by the man, the end of night rejected or wished away by the woman, and the encounter ends with what will prove to be a final parting from the place of love. But if the two women rise from their beds in a similar mood, they approach them very differently, in accordance with the very different tones of the plays. Juliet abandons ‘compliment’, or conventional decorum, as early as the orchard scene, and she is already in that scene able to address Romeo with a mixture of flirtatiousness and naiveté. The question she flings to him from the unreachable height of the balcony, ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ (II. ii. 126) is not wholly innocent of sexual implications, nor, I think, does she intend it to be. On the day of her marriage, as we have seen, Juliet impatiently sues for the coming of night, when she and Romeo will ‘lose a winning match, / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods’ (III. ii. 12–13). Even on her deathbed in the tomb, she converts suicide into an allusively sexual act: failing to find poison left in Romeo’s cup – a conventional female symbol – she instead stabs herself with his dagger: ‘This is thy sheath,’ she says to it, ‘there rust, and let me die’ (V. iii. 171).

For Cressida, of course, the situation is very different. She is not married to Troilus, and does not seem to expect to be. Her position in Troy is extremely tenuous, and she accepts it at first with a cool realism. Certainly she is from the first aware of the bargaining power inherent in her virginity, and she articulates a sexual mercantilism rather uncharacteristic of Shakespeare’s women, though entirely consonant with the dark inequities of the play:

Women are angels, wooing;

Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.

That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:

Men prize the thing ungained more than it is;

That she was never yet, that ever knew

Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

(I. ii. 293–8)

Yet significantly, Cressida violates her own prudent maxim, and yields to her love and desire for Troilus. She, too, abandons compliment, knowing the risks as she does so:

Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day

For many weary months.…

But though I love you well, I wooed you not;

And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man,

Or that we women had men’s privilege

Of speaking first.

(III. ii. 113–28)

In the somber world of Troilus and Cressida women do not have ‘men’s privilege’, either in speaking or in a choice of life; Cressida’s hopeful entry into the world of sexuality leads not to fruitful marriage but to her branding as a ‘daughter of the game’. But the act of sexual initiation itself is a moment of affirmation which not even her later faithlessness will entirely obscure.

Other instances of defloration or references to it in the plays frequently include a reminder of the physical evidence of that act. We have already noted the multiple significances of the spotted handkerchief in Othello, which comes by a series of transferences to seem a symbol of Desdemona’s defloration, whether by Othello or (as he fears) by Cassio. An actual bloody garment appears in the Pyramus and Thisby play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Pyramus interprets the ‘mantle good, / What, stained with blood!’ as evidence that ‘lion vile hath here deflow’red my dear’ (V. i. 280–1, 290). It is difficult, as always, to know where we are with Pyramus’ choice of words; ‘deflow’red’ may well be a metaphor of sorts, but in view of the play’s earlier images of animal sexuality in the woods, the choice by Shakespeare (if not by Bottom-Pyramus) is significant. Once again, the contiguity – even interchangeability – of defloration and dying carries with it not only the force of the usual Renaissance pun, but also a somewhat different meaning, increasingly familiar to the Shakespearean audience, in which death becomes an alternative or substitute for love. A third instance, not unrelated to the theme of the bloody garment, is that of the beheading of Cloten, who has disguised himself in Posthumus’ clothing and set out to ‘enforce’, that is, to rape, Imogen (Cymb. IV. i. 17). His subsequent decapitation at the hands of Guiderius, once again a symbolic castration, substitutes one ‘bloody’ act for another. Significantly Imogen, awakening, describes the dead trunk as an unwelcome ‘bedfellow’ (IV. ii. 295), and comes quite naturally to the conclusion that it is her husband Posthumus who lies beside her.

The most obscure, and for that reason perhaps the most arresting, appearance of the bloodstained token in the plays takes place in As You Like It, when Orlando sends a ‘bloody napkin’ to ‘the shepherd youth / That he in sport doth call his Rosalind’ (IV. iii. 154–5) – that is, of course, to Rosalind herself. Receiving it she swoons, agrees with Oliver that she lacks ‘a man’s heart’, (163), and confesses, accurately enough, ‘I should have been a woman by right’ (173–4). The entire scenario is curious. Oliver, the tyrannous older brother, tells a tale of lying asleep in the forest, a ‘green and gilded snake’ wreathed about his neck, who ‘with her head, nimble in threats, approached / The opening of his mouth’ (108–9). The snake is frightened away by the approach of Orlando, only to provoke ‘a sucked and hungry lioness’ (125) with ‘udders all drawn dry’ (113) to launch her own attack. Orlando, first inclined to abandon his brother to a well-deserved fate, instead gives battle to the lioness and kills her, but not before she can inflict a wound. The blood-stained handkerchief is offered as an explanation for his absence and a sign that he had not forgotten his appointment with ‘Rosalind’.

When we compare this account to that in Lodge’s Rosalynde, we will at once be struck by the nature of Shakespeare’s innovations. Lodge describes the sleeping man, but omits any reference to a snake, and the lion of his story is clearly male: it is described with masculine pronouns, and there is certainly no mention of suckling. Nor does the episode of the ‘bloody napkin’ have its counterpart in the source.²⁴ The enrichment of detail in Shakespeare’s version adds in general to the fairy-tale tone of the work, to the Edenic echoes and to the wonderfully various fauna and flora who inhabit the literary forest of Arden. But it is also clear that the modifications have to do with gender, with sexuality and with initiation. Oliver, an unnatural brother and the unworthy son of a noble father, is menaced by two female animals, one of them a nurturant mother, the other a female (but at the same time unmistakably phallic) snake. Orlando, the male lover, participates in a symbolic ritual exclusively associated with women, offering a cloth spotted with his own blood as a sign of his purity and fidelity in love.

What are we to make of this striking confluence of sexual initiation symbols? Why, indeed, are so many female symbols associated with the two brothers? It seems clear that we are not (seriously) being asked to question the masculinity of either Oliver or Orlando – although we would do well to keep in mind that Orlando is ‘wooing’ a person he believes to be a man. But the phallic snake, and the supine, vulnerable and classically ‘feminine’ posture of Oliver, evoke the central symbols of what must be seen as an identifiable and explicit rite – the deflowering of a young woman. So resonant are the symbols of this particular rite that they are at hand to be used to signal less explicit transformations – Oliver’s self-described ‘conversion’ (iv. iii. 135) from unnatural to natural brother, Orlando’s change from vengeance to forgiveness and brotherly love. The displaced presence of these sexual symbols in this play is perhaps less jarring than would be the case in almost any other, since As You Like It deals so centrally and consistently with the alternation of male and female roles: the heroine spends most of the play dressed as a man, and the hero courts her in this disguise.

What we have in the incident of the ‘bloody napkin’ and the elements that surround it is, then, another version of the sexual rite of passage from childhood to maturity. Immediately following his rescue and ‘conversion’, Oliver falls in love with ‘Aliena’ – so quickly that even Orlando is surprised. Orlando, for his part, tires of the courtship games he is playing with ‘Rosalind’, and declares, ‘I can live no longer by thinking’ (V. ii. 50). He now seeks a real woman, and a real marriage, to parallel the love his brother has found, and which is so deftly described by Rosalind: ‘they [have] made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage: they are in the very wrath of love, and they will together; clubs cannot part them’ (37–41). The theme of sexual fulfillment, previously represented only by Touchstone and Rosalind, now attaches itself to Orlando. Through Rosalind’s teaching, but also through the act of rescuing his brother, he too has come of age, abandoning the play courtship of a supposed ‘youth’ for the adult roles of husband and householder. His love for the androgynous Ganymede has made possible the renewal of his love for Oliver, as well as a deeper and less self-indulgent love for Rosalind. In a complementary way, by attaining the condition of filial love previously lacking in his education, Oliver too gains the capacity to love a woman. His transformation is remarkably swift, passing through filial bonding to sexual love in an hour, but it corresponds to a process we have seen before. The symbolically threatening ‘rape’ of Oliver, and the symbolic ‘deflowering’ of Orlando, which at first seemed so strangely and inappropriately female, now fit more easily into the play’s larger pattern of education in love. The two brothers have been liberated into a world of mature sexuality; the lioness, who reminds us not only of Oliver’s failed nurturance and the possible results of deflowering, but also of the remnants of childlike behavior in both young men, now lies dead.

*

For a dramatist of his time Shakespeare is unusually interested in the whole cycle of marital behavior, but perhaps particularly in the fruits of marriage. We have noted elsewhere that Shakespearean children are often disturbingly precocious, but it is equally true that they are portrayed as dearly loved. The bearing of children and their nurture is uniformly described in the plays as a fulfillment of life’s promise, and the imagery surrounding pregnancy and childbirth is, as we should expect, closely associated with fruitfulness in nature. There is, in fact, a distinctive lyricism in many of Shakespeare’s depictions of pregnant women. In addition to the ‘teeming foison’ and ‘blossoming time’ ascribed to Juliet in Measure for Measure, we have Titania’s evocative portrait of her former votaress, the mother of the Indian changeling boy who is the cause of her dispute with Oberon. ‘On Neptune’s yellow sands,’ she recalls,

we have laughed to see the sails conceive

And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;

Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait

Following – her womb then rich with my young squire –

Would imitate, and sail upon the land,

To fetch me trifles, and return again,

As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.

(MND II. i. 128–34)

Here, as in the Juliet passage, a metaphor of fecundity in the external world becomes elided with a literal description of human pregnancy, and provides a brief glimpse of a world of mellow fruitfulness. The dispute about the changeling itself suggests once more the vital connection in these plays between progeny and natural fertility, while Titania’s eventual surrender of the child may perhaps be viewed as an acknowledgment of his masculine identity: in order that he may fulfill his promise as a man, rather than remain forever a (step-)mother’s child, she allows Oberon to make him a ‘Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild’ (II. i. 25), abandoning her own instinct to ‘withhold’ him from the world, ‘[Crown] him with flowers, and [make] him all her joy’ (26–7).

The fate of the Indian changeling is usefully contrasted with that of Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, whose mother, Hermione, is likewise described in highly ‘natural’ terms. We hear that Hermione ‘rounds apace’ (II. i. 16), like the moon or the seasons of the year – though Leontes can only sneer that Polixenes has made her ‘swell thus’ (62), choosing his metaphor from the language of disease rather than healthful growth. Mamillius’ name, substituted by Shakespeare for Greene’s ‘Garinter’, suggests a connection with Latin ‘mamilla’, the nipple of the female breast, though it is interesting that Leontes explicitly states that his son was not suckled by his mother. ‘Give me the boy,’ he demands of Hermione,

      I am glad you did not nurse him;

Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you

Have too much blood in him.…

Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her.

(II. i. 56–9)

As he does so often, Leontes here misinterprets the evidence at hand; we have already seen that although Hermione did not literally nurse her son he was not denied her nurturance, the primal bond between mother and child. Indeed, separated from her he at once begins to sicken and die, behavior Leontes obtusely construes as a sign of ‘nobleness’; ‘Conceiving the dishonor of his mother, / He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply’ (II. iii. 13–14). ‘Conceiving’, which of course here carries the primary meaning of ‘comprehending’, also suggests pregnancy, and is ironically juxtaposed to declining, drooping and languishing. While thus falsely envisaging his son as a kind of Hamlet, responding to his mother’s dishonor, Leontes also imagines himself prospectively as a Lady Macbeth, as he vows ‘The bastard brains [of Perdita] with these my proper hands / Shall I dash out’ (139–40). The odd circumstance of a boy called ‘Mamillius’ who is not nursed by his mother is, in fact, entirely consonant with the major themes of the play, reminding the audience of claims of love which transcend the merely biological, and thus preparing the way for the adoption of Perdita by the shepherd and the clown, and the transformation of those worthies into ‘gentlemen born’:

The king’s son took me by the hand and called me brother; and then the two kings called my father brother; and then the prince (my brother) and the princess (my sister) called my father father; and so we wept; and there was the first gentlemanlike tears that ever we shed.

(V. ii. 143–8)

Even when not expressly lyrical, the depiction of pregnancy in the plays is associated with larger patterns of fertility. When we learn of the wench Jaquenetta in Love’s Labor’s Lost that ‘she’s quick; the child brags in her belly already’ (V. ii. 674–5), the news interjects a renewed element of fertile energy into a play otherwise dominated by coy flirtatiousness and entirely verbal encounters between the sexes. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Jaquenetta’s ‘quick-ness’ to the death of the King of France, which is announced a few lines later in the same scene, offers a striking actualization of the thematic conflicts with which the play has all along been concerned, and leads directly to the final fruitful songs of winter and spring. A more dramatically energized aspect of the same motif is developed in the character of Cleopatra, whose children seem virtually numberless, if we are to believe the fastidious (and fascinated) Octavius: ‘Caesarion, whom they call my father’s son, / And all the unlawful issue that their lust / Since then hath made between them’ (A&C III. vi. 6–8). Agrippa’s less psychologically perturbed account (‘He plowed her, and she cropped’ – II. ii. 230) and the continued association of Cleopatra with the teeming Nile (‘the seedsman / Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain, / And shortly comes to harvest’ – II. vii. 22–4) again draws a close connection between the childbearing woman and the fertile landscape. And when, on her deathbed, Cleopatra herself perverts the rituals of nurture by placing an asp at her breast, the effect is not to deny her fruitfulness or her maternal role, but rather to demystify death itself:

Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

(V. ii. 308–10)

In essence, this is the feminine version, superbly dramatized, of a simile Shakespeare frequently uses for men in the plays of this same period: that of the dying man who runs to death as the bridegroom to his bed.²⁵ For Cleopatra the action is not one of capitulation, but rather of triumph:

she looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony

In her strong toil of grace.

(345–7)

Just as pregnancy is associated with fulfillment in the plays, barrenness becomes, as we should expect, a sign of spiritual deprivation. It has frequently been noted that lost children in the romances are equated with a loss of fertility in the land, and even with the spiritual death of the parent/king. But the most striking instances of infertility occur in the tragedies. The first words we hear from Julius Caesar are his reminder to Calphurnia that she should stand in Antonius’ way on the feast of the Lupercal, in order for him to touch her in the chase and thus help ‘shake off [her] sterile curse’ (JC I. ii. 9). Plutarch mentions this superstition in his Life of Caesar, but not Caesar’s interest in it, or Calphurnia’s barrenness; in his account the Lupercal is merely an excuse for Antony to offer Caesar a crown.²⁶ Shakespeare’s modification of the source and, in particular, the fact that he places this detail at the very start of the play invite the audience to speculate about how the childlessness of the ruler (whether a Caesar or an Elizabeth) may leave the land open to threats of civil war. Caesar does not, of course, die entirely without heirs. He leaves his gardens and parks to the general populace, as Antony shrewdly announces in his funeral oration; his political position is soon to be filled by his nephew Octavius, who will himself ultimately claim the title of Caesar. Yet neither nephew nor citizens can wholly replace the longed-for son, and Calphurnia’s barrenness, so prominently highlighted by its dramatic placement, casts over the entire play an initial aura of loss and doom.

By the time of King Lear, barrenness has become a vivid metaphor for the quintessence of the unnatural. Lear’s curse on Goneril is explicit:

Into her womb convey sterility,

Dry up in her the organs of increase,

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honor her.

(Lr I. iv. 280–3)

‘If she must teem’, the heir he wishes upon her is a ‘child of spleen’ who will teach her what it is to have a thankless child. But Goneril shows no sign of teeming, and the play that began with the image of a betrothal between Cordelia and the ‘vines of France’ or ‘milk of Burgundy’ (I. i. 84) quickly degenerates into images of cannibalism, the converse of parturition and nurture. Within a hundred lines of her first appearance Cordelia becomes as unwelcome to her father as ‘he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite’ (I. i. 117–18). Later Lear will excoriate his children as ‘pelican daughters’ who feed upon their parent’s blood (III. iv. 74), while Albany peers darkly into the future:

It will come,

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

Like monsters of the deep.

(IV. ii. 49–51)

These cannibalistic images, involving as they do the feeding of parent upon child or child upon parent, imply not only the disorder concomitant upon such role reversal, but also a more specifically sexual dysfunction. The parent, who should give life, devours; the womb becomes transformed into a consuming mouth, the vagina dentata of psychology and anthropology.

In Titus Andronicus, of course, the depiction of cannibalism extends beyond the bounds of metaphor. Titus, dressed ‘like a cook’, presides over a banquet at which Tamora’s sons are served up to their mother:

Why there they are, both bakèd in this pie,

Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,

Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.

(V. iii. 60–2)

In a sense, this pathological inversion of childbirth, in which the parent takes the child back into her body, is prepared for by an earlier moment in the play, when Lavinia, soon to be ravished by those same sons, pleads with them for mercy:

O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee.

The milk thou suck’st from her did turn to marble;

Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny.

(II. iii. 143–5)

That human nature is derived from human nurture, and character is transmitted through the act of suckling, is a common figure of the period; thus Juliet’s nurse crows to her charge, ‘Were not I thine only nurse, / I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat’ (R&J I. iii. 67–8). But Tamora’s sons suck tyranny, not wisdom, and when they are horridly reingested by their mother, they complete the pattern of inversion that her malign nurturance began.

One of the most psychologically peculiar uses of the language of suckling and nursing occurs in Coriolanus, a play whose protagonist is consistently described as a man who was denied sustenance and love at his mother’s breast – and who will in turn deny sustenance in the form of corn to the citizens of Rome. His mother Volumnia defends her actions in sending Coriolanus to war ‘When yet he was but tender-bodied … when for a day of kings’ entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding,’ because she ‘was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame’ (I. iii. 6–13). She hopes that he will return from combat against the Volscians with a bloody brow, since – as she tells his fearful wife – ‘the breasts of Hecuba, / When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier / Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood / At Grecian sword, contemning’ (I. iii. 40–4). Later she will remind her son that ‘thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me’ (III. ii. 129). Significantly Coriolanus borrows his mother’s metaphor when he defects to the Volscian camp, proclaiming himself to Aufidius as one who has ‘Drawn tuns of blood out of thy country’s breast’ (IV.v. 103). But the perverse substitution of blood for nourishing milk does not, as Volumnia hopes, produce an invulnerable hero. Indeed the final discomfiture of Coriolanus comes at the moment when Aufidius sneers to the Volscian troops that ‘at his nurse’s tears / He whined and roared away your victory’ (V. vi. 96–7). Here the socially derogatory ‘nurse’ instead of ‘mother’ adds insult to injury, while the allusion to suckling (and the half-implied suggestion that Coriolanus is not yet weaned) links with the foregoing imagery to complete the portrait of a man-child still helplessly dependent upon his mother.

Volumnia is one version of the destructive nursing mother; another, even more malignant, is Lady Macbeth, who petitions the spirits of murder to ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall’ (I. v. 47–8). Her exhortation to her wavering husband to be steadfast is memorably couched in terms of motherhood:

                I have given suck, and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

(I. vii. 54–9)

Ironically, we have just heard her muse that Macbeth’s nature is ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (I. v. 17) to contemplate murder, and shortly, with equal irony, we will hear his praise of her: ‘Bring forth men-children only; / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males’ (I. vii. 72–4). Macbeth, who will later protest that he is not a female child, ‘the baby of a girl’ (III. iv. 106), becomes in fact the man-child his wife will bring to birth – and dash to shards.

The proverbial question, ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, has perhaps been unfairly maligned: the play is as urgently concerned with dynasty, offspring and succession as any in Shakespeare, and against that background Lady Macbeth’s relationship to maternity stands out in sharp relief. Duncan’s two sons, Banquo’s Fleance, Macduff’s ‘pretty chickens’ (IV. iii. 218) all exemplify the leading characteristics of their parents; in fact, Macduff’s young son, of whom his mother remarks ‘Fathered he is, and yet he’s fatherless’ (IV. ii. 27) resembles his father even in this paradoxical parenthood, since Macduff, ‘from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’ (V. viii. 15–16), was thus ‘none of woman born’ (IV. i. 80). Moreover, Lady Macduff herself, a fruitful wife and the mother of numerous children, provides the most vivid possible contrast to Lady Macbeth’s own barrenness and faulty nurture. Even the ‘temple-haunting martlet’ that nests in the crenelations of Macbeth’s castle contributes to this sense of contrast, for ‘the pendent bed and procreant cradle’ of the breeding birds offers an ironic antithesis to the destructive energies of the human occupants within. The irony is heightened by both the dramatic situation and the placement of these lines, since Banquo speaks them to Duncan, unwarily supporting the view that one can find the mind’s construction in the face, and the scene in which they are spoken (I. vi.) is immediately followed by that which contains not only the ‘I have given suck’ speech, but also Macbeth’s references to ‘men-children only’ and ‘pity, like a naked newborn babe’.

The puzzle of Lady Macbeth’s maternity is never solved in the play, since no child – save Macbeth himself – is ever seen or mentioned. But the active malignity of a mother who would nurse her infants with gall and pledge to dash their brains out is, perceptually, much greater than the merely passive picture of a barren Calphurnia or a determinedly virginal Rosaline. The opposite of Cleopatra, who poetically transmutes the poison of snakes into mother’s milk, Lady Macbeth in her animadversions on motherhood provides the play with one of its most striking continuing images, an image which will resound anew in Malcolm’s fictive pledge of iniquity:

            Nay, had I pow’r, I should

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell.

(IV. iii. 97–8)

IV

The representations of sexual behavior in the plays are not, of course, limited to those acts explicitly shown or mentioned. At the same time that Shakespeare’s characters are explicitly concerned with problems of virginity, marriage, child-bearing and the like, the symbolic language of imagery and action reinterprets and enriches these concerns. In some cases these dramatic symbols seem to be the hidden psychological counterparts of visible acts and audible thoughts; in other cases such symbols appear to serve as counterpoint to, or even as ironic commentary upon, developments in the plot.

The specific image of ‘deflowering’, for example, occurs from time to time in Shakespeare’s works in a variety of contexts. Although some poets of the fourteenth century did use ‘flower’ as a synonym for virginity,²⁷ this metaphorical connotation seems to have been quickly lost. The earliest definition of ‘deflower’ itself in the OED is ‘To deprive (a woman) of her virginity; to violate, ravish (1382)’, with no explicit connection to ‘flower’ at all. Characteristically, Shakespeare renews or reconstructs the floral metaphor, with interesting results. Although he will occasionally use ‘deflower’ without any allusive sense (e.g. Titus II. iii. 191; Measure IV. iv. 21), as early as The Rape of Lucrece he has Tarquin vow to himself ‘I must deflower’ (348) and then inform Lucrece, ‘I see what crosses my attempt will bring, / I know what thorns the growing rose defends’ (491–2). Likewise, Old Capulet, discovering Juliet apparently dead, laments to Paris, ‘O son, the night before thy wedding day / Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowerèd by him’ (R&J IV. v. 35–7). As we have already noted, the king in All’s Well seeks Diana’s assurance that she is ‘yet a fresh uncroppèd flower’ (V. iii. 326). Theseus’ view in his charge to Hermia that the ‘rose distilled’ is ‘earthlier happy’ than that left ‘withering on the virgin thorn’ is yet another, slightly more oblique, instance of this same figure. To these merely allusive or verbal references, however, we can add two with more far-reaching dramatic consequences: the flower-giving scenes of Ophelia and Perdita.

One change is already apparent: where we have been speaking of deflowerers or flower-takers, we now have flower-givers, women who ‘de-flower’ themselves. This is, of course, exactly what Ophelia is repeatedly cautioned not to do. Hamlet’s insistent mention of the nunnery is the third such warning she has received. Polonius, who will shortly aver that ‘drabbing’ is no disgrace for his son, commands his daughter to ‘Be something scanter of [her] maiden presence’ (I. iii. 121), and, in fact to avoid Hamlet altogether, while Laertes’ icily practical (and at the same time oddly prurient) advice includes an inverted echo of Theseus on the fate of a ‘barren sister’: ‘The chariest maid is prodigal enough / If she unmask her beauty to the moon’ (I. iii. 36–7). In this same speech Laertes alludes to infected flowers, ‘the infants of the spring’ galled by the cankerworm ‘before their buttons [i.e. buds] be disclosed’ (39–40), and Ophelia counters, with uncharacteristic spirit, by warning him to avoid ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ (50). Both images obliquely equate virgins with flowers, and predatory males with flower-pickers, in much that same way that Milton will later describe Proserpina as a flower ‘gathered’ by gloomy Dis.²⁸

In the mad scene, however, it is Ophelia who plucks the flowers and gives them away. As with Hermia’s dream of the snake, this gesture is a displacement; in Freudian terms it might be considered an action undertaken by the unconscious to express what has been repressed by the conscious mind. Ophelia’s song is, of course, a ballad of lost virginity, couched in a language most untypical of her usual chaste persona:

Then up he rose and donned his clothes

And dupped the chamber door,

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more.…

Young men will do’t if they come to’t,

By Cock, they are to blame.

Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed.’

He answers:

‘So would I’a’ done, by yonder sun,

And thou hadst not come to my bed.’

(IV. v. 52–67)

Excluded from the normal pattern of sexual initiation by her own filial submissiveness as well as by Hamlet’s action, she becomes instead a symbolic self-deflowerer, whose death is perforce both a consummation and a source of renewed fertility: ‘from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!’ (V. i. 239–40). The violet, a traditional emblem of faithfulness, is associated with Ophelia’s affections from Laertes’ first cautionary speech (Hamlet’s favor is ‘A violet in the youth of primy nature’ – I. iii. 7) to Polonius’ death (‘they withered all when my father died’ – IV. v. 184–5) and beyond that to her gravesite; but in her dying moments violets are replaced by garlands of another purple flower, significantly described by Gertrude: ‘long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them’ (IV. vii. 169–71). The demure violet becomes the phallic early purple orchid,²⁹ a sign at once of sex and death.

The flower-giving ceremony in The Winter’s Tale seems at first glance very different from Ophelia’s, yet formally they have much in common: a young virgin distributes floral emblems to appropriate recipients according to one or another language of flowers. (‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.’ – Ham. IV. v. 175–6; ‘flow’rs / Of middle summer, and I think they are given / To men of middle age’ – WT IV. iv. 106–8).³⁰ And once again, one kind of flower is missing. Ophelia’s sheaf lacked violets, Perdita’s lacks ‘flow’rs o’ th’ spring’ (113) to bestow upon her suitor, Florizel, and the shepherdesses ‘That wear upon your virgin branches yet / Your maidenheads growing’ (115–16). This may be an oblique reference to the incipient presence of fall (and fallenness) in the apparently paradisal landscape, but it also seems an apt reminder of Perdita’s own liminal state. She is easily able to gratify old and middle-aged men who represent neither a sexual threat nor an analogy to her own sexual condition: she wishes she could give flowers to Florizel, but cannot. Indeed, her expressed desire ‘To strew him o’er and o’er’ (129) not unnaturally leads Florizel to ask ‘What, like a corse?’ once again implying a substitution of death for sexual love. Moreover, some of the metaphors in which Perdita describes flowers, both those she has and those she lacks, are oddly preoccupied with the very subject of deflowering. ‘The marigold that goes to bed wi’ th’ sun, / And with him rises, weeping’ (105–6) is an image of fearful and unhappy sexual initiation, and ‘pale primroses, / That die unmarried ere they can behold / Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady / Most incident to maids)’ (122–5) offers a picture of the unhappy alternative, spinsterhood and death. We might perhaps view Perdita’s flower-giving as a therapeutic version of Ophelia’s, since it does result in fulfilled love and marriage. But Perdita’s maiden fearfulness emerges in the metaphors she chooses, as well as in her gesture itself – and, as we have already seen, it is not until the arrival of Autolycus that sexual energies are fully acknowledged or accepted in the world of the sheepshearing feast.

Just as the fragility and beauty of the virginal condition is emblematized as a flower, so its preciousness is connoted by another frequent emblem, that of the treasure. Thus Laertes warns Ophelia not to ‘lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open / To his unmastered importunity’ (Ham. I. iii.31–2). As this example suggests, the treasure is an apt metaphor not only because it represents value, but also because it is enclosed: the treasure chest becomes a womb, the deflowerer becomes a thief.³¹ In Cymbeline this image comes dramatically to life, as Iachimo persuades Imogen to store in her bedchamber a trunk ostensibly containing plate and jewels. In fact, the trunk contains Iachimo himself, who by this strategem is able to violate Imogen’s bedchamber and obtain false evidence that he has made love to her.³² In a variant of this same figure, the virgin beloved is seen as a miser, hoarding up unspent riches. Romeo rails against Rosaline’s ‘strong proof of chastity’ (I. i. 213), complaining that

      she is rich in beauty; only poor

That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store.

(218–19)

The so-called ‘procreation sonnets’ (1–17) argue essentially the same point, especially sonnet 4, in which the beloved is addressed as ‘unthrifty loveliness’ (1), ‘beauteous niggard’ (5) and ‘profitless usurer’ (7). Sexuality becomes an investment, which brings returns not only in the form of pleasure, but also of children.

The fullest application of this metaphor, of course, occurs in The Merchant of Venice, which rings the changes on many of these themes. Shylock, who early on speaks of money as something to ‘breed’ (I. iii. 93), locks in his house both his virgin daughter and his hoarded ducats, but both escape and are ultimately given to Lorenzo.³³ He laments the loss of daughter and ducats with indiscriminate grief, showing perhaps a slight preference to the ducats, and visualizes both as re-enclosed under his power: ‘I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!’ (III. i. 84–6). Once again, death is imagined as a substitute for marriage, while the coffin symbolically preserves the virginity which will in fact be lost. Manifestly, Portia’s three caskets are also in this sense womb or virginity emblems. Throwing the treasure down from her father’s window, Jessica had enjoined Lorenzo to ‘catch this casket; it is worth the pains’ (II. vi. 33). Likewise Portia, whose fate in marriage depends upon her father’s test, invites Bassanio to try his luck with the caskets of gold, silver, and lead: ‘I am locked in one of them; / If you do love me, you will find me out’ (III. ii. 40–1). Once he selects the right casket and finds her portrait within (an inversion of the physical reality, that the casket is inside her body), the marriage is solemnized by the exchange of rings. The casket having been opened, there is no longer need for a functional symbol of virginity: the ring now comes to represent married chastity, an unbroken circlet penetrated only by the chosen spouse.

This image of the ring placed upon the outstretched finger as a symbol of intercourse is familiar from folkloric and mythic sources as well as from popular and vulgar tradition.³⁴ In The Merchant of Venice the substitution of the open ring for the closed casket as the emblem of the female sexual organs marks an important turning point. The treasure, once locked away, is now put to use as a medium of exchange. Rings are repeatedly associated throughout the play with women of marriageable age. Shylock’s ring, a turquoise (a stone thought to ‘take away all enmity, and to reconcile husband and wife’)³⁵ was given to him ‘when [he] was a bachelor’ (III. i. 117–18) by the woman who would become his wife. Jessica, the rightful inheritor of the ring in both a legal and a sexual sense, takes it away with her and is reported to have traded it for a monkey, proverbially one of the most promiscuous of animals. In Shylock’s view, this is exactly what she has done: traded her virginity, which should remain locked up, for a licentious relationship with Lorenzo. What we actually see of Jessica seems not to accord with this flighty behavior. The episode, which is described to Shylock by a fellow Jew, instead serves the play symbolically in a dual fashion, emphasizing Jessica’s repudiation of her father’s values and offering a psychological insight into Shylock’s mind. (We may perhaps compare this association of Lorenzo with a monkey to Hermia’s conflation of Lysander with an equally sexual, equally distasteful snake – with, of course, the crucial difference that the immature or warped sexual imagination here belongs to the father and not the young girl herself.)

The central ‘ring trick’ in the play, however, is played by Portia and Nerissa, who bestow rings upon their husbands at the time of betrothal, exacting a promise that they never be removed. Disguised as the learned ‘doctor’ and his ‘clerk’, they then mischievously obtain the rings from their reluctant spouses, as the only acceptable payment for the confounding of Shylock. Back home, in their own persons, the ladies proceed to accuse their husbands of unfaithfulness, equating ring and sexual fidelity in straightforward terms:

Portia Since he hath got the jewel that I loved,

And that which you did swear to keep for me,

I will become as liberal as you;

I’ll not deny him anything I have,

No, not my body nor my husband’s bed…

I’ll have that doctor for mine bedfellow.

Nerissa    And I his clerk.

(V. i. 224–34)

Since Portia and Nerissa are the doctor and the clerk, this promise can easily be kept, without the breaking of the marriage vow.

Variations of the ‘ring trick’ appear in several other plays, and whereas in The Merchant of Venice the link between ring and cervix is elaborated in a somewhat expository fashion, elsewhere the identification seems virtually taken for granted. Olivia, smitten with the boy ‘Cesario’ who is Viola in disguise, sends him a ring, claiming that he left it behind him. Viola, while asserting to Malvolio that ‘She took the ring of me. I’ll none of it’ (II. ii. 12), privately muses ‘I left no ring with her. What means this lady?’ (17) and comes instantly to the correct conclusion: ‘She loves me sure’ (22). The ring is not Viola’s offer of sexuality, much less Orsino’s, but rather Olivia’s gift of herself. Recalled to her house, Viola once again refuses Olivia’s affections and is, significantly, presented with a new token: ‘here, wear this jewel for me; ‘tis my picture’ (III. iv. 213). The pattern reverses that in The Merchant of Venice: the open ring is succeeded by the closed locket or pendant, in which the maiden Olivia remains sealed. Only when she meets and marries Sebastian does she once again acquire a ring, as is made clear by the priest who performs the ceremony:

A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands,

Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strength’ned by interchangement of your rings.

(V. i. 155–8)

For Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, the problem is somewhat different: not how to give a ring, but how to get one. Her husband, the unlovable Bertram, who prefers ‘Wars … To the dark house and the detested wife’ (II. iii. 294–5), flatly declares ‘I will not bed her,’ and sends instead an ultimatum:

When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but to such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’.

(III. ii. 58–61)

The sequence of ‘ring’ and ‘child’ is self-explanatory in view of the other ring references we have noted; moreover, the play, as if to underscore the point, uses ‘ring-carrier’ as a synonym for ‘bawd’ (III. v. 90) – the only instance of that term in all of Shakespeare. Helena’s stratagem, by which a virgin aptly named Diana will pretend to surrender to Bertram in exchange for his ring, prompts a conversation which once again makes the implicit explicit:

Diana Give me that ring.

Bertram    I’ll lend it thee, my dear, but have no power

To give it from me.…

It is an honor ‘longing to our house,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors,

Which were the greatest obloquy i’ th’ world

In me to lose.

Diana    Mine honor’s such a ring.

(IV. ii. 39–45)

And when Helena, in substitute for Diana, obtains Bertram’s ring, she gives him hers, assuring the denouement before the king. The double proof of ring and pregnancy finally resolves the case, fulfilling the seemingly impossible conditions of Bertram’s initial demand.

Moreover, not only rings but also other jeweled circlets play this role in Shakespeare’s plays. In The Comedy of Errors Anti-pholus of Ephesus, annoyed at his wife’s conduct, promises to give a gold chain designed for her to a courtesan instead. On the strength of this promise, the courtesan herself bestows a diamond ring upon Antipholus of Syracuse, whom she mistakes for his twin. In Cymbeline, Imogen and Posthumus exchange tokens as he embarks upon his exile. She gives him a diamond ring, he offers a bracelet, a ‘manacle of love’ (I. i. 122). In the course of his nocturnal espionage, Iachimo steals the bracelet, and by its evidence convinces Posthumus that he has enjoyed Imogen’s sexual favors. In both of these cases the sexual symbolism is muted, but in neither is it absent. The ‘golden gifts’ (Err. III. ii. 184) accompany and emblematize a pledge of fidelity, but they are also expressly related to actual physical love.

Of all the symbols Shakespeare uses to denote sexual activity and sexual rites of passage in the plays, the most traditional of all is the walled garden. Significantly, such a garden unites the image of the flower with that of the treasure, casket or ring, since it is an enclosure which contains flowers. An entire – and familiar – medieval heritage lies behind this figure, from the Romance of the Rose to Domenico Veneziano’s painting of The Annunciation, a work in which all the iconography of the trope is present. In it the Virgin stands, head bowed, in a porticoed room which opens on to a walled garden, visible only as a corridor framed by vines and foliage. At the further end of the corridor is a double wooden door, bolted shut. The Virgin’s blue robe is draped over what at first appears to be part of a bench, but which on closer examination proves to be an enclosed chest. Across the room, the angel Gabriel kneels and, holding out a cluster of lilies in one hand, reverently raises the index finger of the other. This is the Annunciation; it is also the act of conception, taking place before our eyes. Room, chest, garden, all signify the womb; the passageway is at the same time anatomical and geographic, the bolted doors (and the lilies) suggest the virgin state, the raised finger is unmistakably, though subtly, phallic.

Such symbolism, while familiar, is more frequently found in poetry and painting than it is in drama; yet Shakespeare makes full and intriguing use of its possibilities, grafting them onto a secular context. The traditional biblical description of the bride as a hortus conclusus, a ‘garden inclosed’ (Song of Songs 4:12), becomes in his plays a geographical emblem of virginity and a locus for sexual initiation. The terms ‘garden’ and ‘orchard’ at this period both refer to an enclosed plot of land devoted to horticulture; ‘orchard’ derives etymologically from Latin hortus and Anglo-Saxon yard. It is in such settings in the plays, almost inevitably, that love is sworn and affections given. Thus Troilus walks in the orchard waiting for Cressida’s approach, and is then invited into her house. Olivia, who has sequestered herself like a ‘cloistress’ in her chambers, emerges twice into the garden, the first time to swear her love for Viola-Cesario, the next to be married to Sebastian. In Much Ado, both Beatrice and Benedick are gulled into hearing supposed tidings of the other’s love, and each revelation takes place in the orchard. And with ironic appropriateness, the same orchard becomes the scene of Don John’s revelation to Claudio of Hero’s ‘infidelity’.

Walled enclosures play an important role in Measure for Measure, from the cloisters of St Clare and the duke’s adoptive monastery to the ‘moated grange’ which walls up Mariana, Angelo’s jilted fiancée, and Angelo’s own establishment, so tellingly described by Isabella:

He hath a garden circummured with brick,

Whose western side is with a vineyard backed;

And to that vineyard is a planchèd gate,

That makes his opening with this bigger key.

This other doth command a little door

Which from the vineyard to the garden leads.

There have I made my promise

Upon the heavy middle of the night

To call upon him.

(IV. i. 28–36)

Just as Mariana’s grange is the emblem of her enclosed virginity, so Angelo’s garden is the counterpart of his. In a startling – but not inappropriate – reversal of roles, Isabella is entrusted with the phallic key; Angelo himself exhibits a double perversity, first by insisting on denying his sensual nature (more unusual and unnatural perhaps in a man than a woman), then by veiling his lust under the continued guise of the reluctant virgin. The entire dramatic action of the play becomes, at least in one sense, the freeing of the individual from the walled enclosure, no matter how defined or how enforced. Moreover, if we call to mind Freud’s association of beheading with symbolic castration, we may observe that the severed head of the prisoner Ragozine, produced in counterfeit for that of the expectant father Claudio, once again suggests how close Viennese events have come to answering Pompey’s blunt inquiry : ‘Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?’ (II. i. 228–9).

But perhaps the best known of all walled garden encounters in Shakespeare is that dramatic moment in Romeo and Juliet more usually described as the ‘balcony scene’ (II. ii). ‘The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,’ as Juliet points out (63), and Romeo, though he stands in the posture of a Petrarchan suitor gazing up at his unattainable lady, has already crossed the first barrier by entering the garden at all. The orchard as a dramatic locale appears three times more in the play, each time in direct connection with the courtship, marriage and consummation of the lovers. In II. v. Juliet impatiently awaits the Nurse’s message, announcing the time and place of the marriage. The Nurse, who has early expressed her eagerness to see Juliet ‘married once’ (I. iii. 61) – and perhaps more – hastens to fetch a ladder, ‘by the which your love / Must climb a bird’s nest soon when it is dark’ (II. v. 74–5). In III. ii. Juliet appears alone on the balcony overlooking the orchard, and speaks her moving lines of sexual longing to the ‘love-performing night’:

                      Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match,

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.…

O, I have bought the mansion of a love,

But not possessed it; and though I am sold,

Not yet enjoyed.

(10–13, 26–8)

Significantly, there are two maidenhoods to be lost; in her view Romeo is as virginal as she. The image of the ‘mansion’ provides yet another interior space which must be entered and ‘possessed’. The implicit reversal of Freudian categories – Juliet is the possessor, Romeo associated with the mansion – emphasizes their interchangeability, and calls attention to Juliet’s remarkable forthrightness and self-knowledgeability in sexual desire.³⁶ The final orchard scene (III.v.) shows us Romeo ‘aloft’ on the balcony with Juliet. The sundering of the sexual barrier between the lovers finds its counterpart in the conquest of the physical barriers which have kept them apart.

Both balcony and orchard now disappear as dramatic loci, and are replaced by another kind of enclosure, the tomb. The womb-tomb symbolism of the play, articulated by Friar Lawrence but present throughout, is too well known to need further documentation. Capulet’s lament, ‘Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir; / My daughter he hath wedded’ (IV.v. 38–9) particularizes and personifies the image, as does Romeo’s more elegant and lyrical version of the same fantasy:

                            Shall I believe

That unsubstantial Death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(V. iii. 102–5)

We have noticed other instances of this figure, in which death replaces or displaces marriage, but the situation in Romeo and Juliet is in some respects unique, suggesting yet another dimension of Shakespeare’s treatment of sexual rites of passage. To understand why this is so, it will be helpful to return to the balcony scene (II. ii.) and in particular to Romeo’s explanation of his presence in the garden.

When Juliet expresses surprise at his presence, he replies that ‘with love’s light wings’ he was able to mount the wall, for ‘what love can do, that dares love attempt. ‘ This is not the first time in the play that Romeo has been directly linked with the persona of ‘love’. It is he who proposes a prologue to the intended masque at the Capulet ball, only to be told by Benvolio that such a practice is out of date: ‘We’ll have no Cupid hoodwinked with a scarf, / Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath’ (I. iv. 4–5). He declines to dance in the mask, saying that his ‘soul of lead’ keeps him to the ground. ‘You are a lover,’ Mercutio replies. ‘Borrow Cupid’s wings / And soar with them above a common bound.’ (I. iv. 17–18). As so often happens in this play, a verbal cliché applied to Rosaline becomes a vivid and literal metaphor when Romeo meets Juliet.

The association of Romeo with ‘love’, Cupid or Eros, the god of desire, is augmented by other details of the balcony scene. Repeatedly we are reminded that the scene is played in darkness and that Juliet cannot see the man who stands below her window. Her very appearance and her unguarded words poured out to the receptive night suggest that she is sure she is alone. The speech is both soliloquy and apostrophe, summoning in fancy one who must in reality be far away.

Romeo, doff thy name;

And for thy name, which is no part of thee,

Take all myself.

Suddenly, shockingly, out of the darkness comes a reply:

                 I take thee at thy word.

Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;

Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

(II. ii. 47–51)

Juliet’s response is telling: ‘What man art thou, that, thus be-screened in night, / So stumblest on my counsel?’ (52–3). He has just said his name – and offered to replace it with the name of ‘love’. But Juliet, stunned and taken aback, can register at first only an alien presence in the darkness. Recognition, when it comes, occurs by stages and emphasizes not his hidden figure but his revealed voice. ‘I know the sound. / Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?’ (59–60). Her surprise is natural and persuasive; in effect her incantation has come true. Yet repeatedly the scene draws attention to the darkness. Twice she warns that if her kinsmen ‘do see thee, they will murder thee’, and he rejoins that ‘I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes’ (75). Love, the blind, has led him there. ‘He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes’ (81). Can she see him? Or does ‘night’s cloak’ hide him from her sight as well? The language she uses is suggestively ambiguous. ‘Thou knowst the mask of night is on my face’ – ‘knowst’, not ‘seest’. And the business transacted between the lovers in this scene is entirely aural and verbal: Juliet’s reverie, and Romeo’s interruption of it; his attempt to swear by ‘yonder’ moon (which both of them can see) ; her suggestion that he swear by himself, ‘Which is the god of my idolatry’ (114); the exchange of vows; her repeated summonings, and his replies: ‘Romeo! – My sweet?’ (168), and, again, ‘Hist! Romeo, hist! O for a falc’ner’s voice / To lure this tassel gentle back again!’ (159–60). Moreover, Romeo’s reply to this last call is itself significant, in line with the Cupid figures we have already noticed.

It is my soul that calls upon my name.

How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears !

(165–7)

Once again we may notice the emphasis upon hearing and speaking, rather than beholding, the beloved. But the identification of Juliet with ‘my soul’ not only recalls the contrasting ‘soul of lead’ produced by love for Rosaline, but also brings to mind a myth which seems structurally related to this scene and to the play as a whole: the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

The myth is briefly recounted: Psyche, the youngest of three daughters, was so beautiful that she was compared to Venus herself, arousing Venus’ jealousy and enmity. She therefore instructs Cupid, or Eros, to cause Psyche to fall in love with the ugliest of men. Psyche is led to a cliff top, following the instructions of an oracle, which predicts that she will be taken by a snake-like monster. The procession which leads her to the peak thus resembles that of a funeral. But she is rescued by the West Wind and taken to a palace by Cupid, who, against his mother’s orders, has fallen in love with her. He takes Psyche for his wife, but will not let her look at him, coming to her only at night and in darkness. Persuaded by her two jealous sisters (who have been permitted to visit her), Psyche fears that her husband may be a monster, and one night when he is sleeping she lifts a lamp to look at him. She sees, of course, a remarkably beautiful youth. But a drop of oil falls on his shoulder, waking him, and he leaves her in anger. The rest of the tale involves the three seemingly impossible tasks set her by Venus, the last of which is to visit Hades and bring back a casket of beauty from Persephone. She achieves this last task, but (again prompted by curiosity toward the forbidden) she opens the casket, which contains not beauty but a deathly sleep. Now Cupid, convinced of her sincere repentance, persuades Jupiter to make her immortal, and she reawakens and is married to him.

The story of Cupid and Psyche is told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, which had been published in London in 1566 in the English translation of William Adlington. Shakespeare would therefore have had access to it in his own language, as well as – probably – in the Latin original. Apuleius, a neo-Platonist, may indeed have been offering an allegory of what his modern translator, Robert Graves, calls ‘the progress of the rational soul toward intellectual love’,³⁷ but psychologists have found other aspects of the myth equally fascinating and suggestive. Freud points out that Psyche is a kind of love- and death-goddess: ‘Her wedding is celebrated like a funeral, she has to descend into the underworld, and afterwards sinks into a death-like sleep.’³⁸ A Jungian interpretation offered by Erich Neumann sees the myth as essentially ‘a rite of initiation’³⁹ in which Psyche is awakened from ‘the darkness of unconscious and the harshness of her matriarchal captivity and, in individual encounter with the masculine, loves, that is recognizes, Eros’.⁴⁰ According to Neumann the casket of beauty that Psyche must steal is ‘the beauty of the glass coffin, to which Psyche is expected to regress, the barren frigidity of mere maidenhood, without love for a man (as exacted by the matriarchate)’;⁴¹ in just this way Friar Lawrence offers to ‘dispose of’ Juliet ‘among a sisterhood of holy nuns’. The happy ending of the story Neumann describes as

The feminine mystery of rebirth through love. In no goddess can Eros experience and know the miracle that befalls him through the human Psyche, the phenomenon of a love which is conscious, which, stronger than death, anointed with divine beauty, is willing to die, to receive the beloved as the bridegroom of death.⁴²

Here again there are congruences with Romeo and Juliet, in the semi-divine Rosaline, the conscious love stronger than death, the image of love as a bridegroom.

Bruno Bettelheim, associating the story with what he called the ‘animal-groom’ cycle of fairy tales, sees the funeral procession as an emblem of the death of maidenhood, and Psyche’s curiosity about her mysterious husband as a reaching out toward mature knowledge, putting aside mere narcissistic pleasure. He singles out for special attention the fact that ‘the groom is absent during the day and present only in the darkness of night … in short, he keeps his day and night experiences separate from one another.’⁴³ In Bettelheim’s view, the myth describes a movement toward maturity on the part of Cupid as well as Psyche. The objective, which each must come to accept, is ‘to wed the aspects of sex, love, and life into a unity’.⁴⁴ He remarks, as well, on the ‘timely’ message of the tale: ‘Notwithstanding all the hardships woman has to suffer to be reborn in full consciousness and humanity … this is what she must do. ‘⁴⁵ Psyche, as the mortal partner and the one forced to undergo privation and hardship, is properly viewed as the protagonist, with whose thoughts and feelings the reader will associate his own.

I would like to suggest that when viewed in this context the resemblances between Romeo and Juliet and the myth of Cupid and Psyche are both striking and fundamental. In both there are an unseen lover and a love relationship which is possible only in darkness. Both describe the passage of a woman from paternal domination to sensual submission and thence to individuation through pain and sacrifice. Both offer a vivid image of the marriage with Death, and in each the entire pattern is capable of being viewed as one of initiation for the woman. I do not – and would not – contend that Shakespeare consciously borrowed from the legend, either from Apuleius or through folkloric sources. But what I do suggest is that certain congruences are arresting and persuasive, that the myth of Cupid and Psyche represents a basic, underlying pattern of human maturation and, specifically, of sexual growth, and that, however derived, this pattern is clearly present and significant in many of Shakespeare’s plays.

Notes

1  Keith Thomas, ‘The changing family’, The Times Literary Supplement (21 October 1977), 1226–7.

2  Gellert Spencer Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942), pp. 1–12.

3  Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp. 40, 519.

4  James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD (London: Everyman, 1906), 1, p. 627.

5  Stone, p. 180.

6  Stone, p. 87.

7  Stone, pp. 282–7.

8  Stone, pp. 99–100.

9  Stone, pp. 108, 376–7.

10  Some nuns did in fact bring dowries to their religious houses, in defiance of Church law but at the behest of the convents. Nonetheless, the expenses would not have compared to those of an important marriage. Cf. Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 14–24.

11  Power, pp. 42–95.

12  Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), p. 141.

13  J. Oliphant (ed.), Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster (Glasgow, 1903) pp. 51, 52.

14  Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches (Oxford, 1844), pp. 46–58. Stone, p. 198.

15  Stone, p. 196.

16  Thomas Sargrove, quoted in Lacey Baldwin Smith, Elizabeth Tudor, Portrait of a Queen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1922), p. 119.

17  Smith, p. 120.

18  J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934; rpt. Doubleday, 1957), p. 142; Smith, pp. 118–33.

19  Erasmus, The Comparation of a Virgin and a Martyr, Thomas Paynell (trans.), 1537; facsimile rpt. of Berthelet edition, intro. William James Hirten (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), p. 50.

20  Stone, p. 135.

21  William Perkins, ‘Of Christian oeconomie, or household government’, in Works (London, 1626), III, p. 689.

22  John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 50–5. Stone, pp. 137–8.

23  Sigmund Freud, ‘On the sexual theories of children’ (1908) in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, IX (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1959, rpt. 1962), p. 215.

24  W. W. Greg (ed.), Lodge’s ‘Rosalynde’, Being the Original of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, (New York: Duffield & Company; London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), pp. 93–7.

25  For example, Measure for Measure III. ii. 82–4; King Lear IV. vi. 199; Antony and Cleopatra IV. xiv. 99–101.

26  T. J. B. Spencer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Coriolanus in the Translation of Sir Thomas North (Middlesex, England, and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1964; rpt. 1968), pp. 82–3.

27  For example, John Gower, Confessio Amantis, II, 334: ‘O Pallas noble quene … Help that I lose nought my flour.’

28  Paradise Lost, IV, ll. 269–72, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.) (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).

29  Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora (London: Phoenix House, 1955). Ophelia’s ‘long purples’ have been identified as the marsh plant, purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria L.), but Grigson argues persuasively that ‘Shakespeare meant the bawdier plant, Orchis mascula’, the early purple orchid (p. 194). Because of its appearance, this plant has been regarded as an aphrodisiac since classical times. Grigson’s description makes the reason clear: ‘Dig up an Early Purple Orchid and you find two rôot-tubers in which food is stored, a new, firm one, which is filling up for next year’s growth, an old slack one, which is emptying and supplying the present needs. The symbolism of the kinds of Orchis with undivided tubers could hardly be overlooked’ (p. 425). Like the purple loosestrife, the early purple orchid is popularly known as ‘long purples’, and also as ‘dead man’s finger’, the name Gertrude says is used by ‘our cold maids’ (Ham. IV. vii. 169–71). It is also called ‘cuckoo cock’, ‘dog stones’ and ‘priest’s pintel’, any of which might be the ‘grosser name’ employed by ‘liberal shepherds’. As Grigson remarks, ‘in Hamlet Shakespeare knew exactly what he was about’ when he included this flower among Ophelia’s garlands (p. 427). This identification has been accepted by most modern Shakespeare editors, including W. J. Craig, 1930; J. Dover Wilson, 1936; Hardin Craig, 1951; I. Ribner and G. L. Kittredge, 1971; G. Blakemore Evans, 1974. For another view, identifying the ‘long purples’ as Arum maculatum, the Wild Arum or Cuckoo-Pint, see Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘Hamlet: Ophelia’s long purples’, Shakespeare Quarterly, xxix, 3 (Summer 1978), 413–17.

30  Juliet, too, makes ‘the prettiest sententious of [Romeo] and rosemary’ before her marriage (R&J II. iv. 215–16), and the friar will then propose that her corpse be strewed with rosemary after her supposed death, proclaiming that ‘she’s best married that dies married young’ (IV. 5. 78).

31  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953, rpt. 1958, 1962), p. 354.

32  See Marjorie Garber, ‘Cymheline and the languages of myth’, Mosaic, x, 3 (Spring 1977), 104–15.

33  Money is frequently described by Freud as a symbol of feces, and Shylock’s retentiveness in this respect seems intimated by such remarks as his animadversion on bagpipes (IV. i. 49–50) and his command to Launcelot ‘Shut up my house’s ears – I mean my casements’ (II. v. 34), where ‘ears’ and ‘arse’ would arguably have been pronounced the same. The connection of feces and sexuality is suggested in Freud’s essay ‘On the sexual theories of children’ (1908) and elsewhere. A tentative theory about Shylock’s ‘immaturity’ in psychological terms might perhaps be advanced, based upon his ‘infantile’ conflation of daughter and ducats throughout the play. On the other hand, Shylock also significantly bewails the loss of his ‘two stones, two rich and precious stones’ (II. viii. 20), which have been taken away by Jessica. In Shakespeare’s time ‘stones’ was a common term for testicles (cf. the comic use of the pun in the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ play, MND V. i. 190). Symbolically, Jessica thus gelds Shylock twice by removing his daughter and his ducats, leaving him both without child and without money to ‘breed’ with (I. iii. 93).

34  Cf. E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), p. 77: ‘jokes equating a ring with the female pudendum are fairly numerous in Renaissance literature’. Colman cites as one example an anecdote from Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, J. M. Cohen (trans.) (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 368. We might also compare here the symbolic act of DeFlores in The Changeling, who severs the ring-bearing finger of Alonzo de Piracquo, Beatrice’s murdered suitor, and produces both ring and finger in evidence of his deed. In the same play Alibius, counseling wariness against cuckolding, advises old Lollio, ‘I would wear my ring on my own finger’ (I. ii. 27).

35  T. Nichols, Lapidary, cited by Steevens in his edition of Shakespeare (1773). See the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, John Russell Brown (ed.) (London: Methuen, 1955; rpt. 109)’ P. 75.

36  Imogen will speak of ‘The innocent mansion of my love, the heart’ (Cymb. II. iv. 68).

37  Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass, Robert Graves (trans.) (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951), translator’s introduction, p. xix.

38  Sigmund Freud, ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913) in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958, rpt. 1962), p. 300n. The footnote attributes this observation to Otto Rank.

39  Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (New York: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 112.

40  Neumann, p. 78.

41  Neumann, p. 118.

42  Neumann, p. 125.

43  Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 294.

44  Bettelheim, p. 294.

45  Bettelheim, p. 295.