University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

A Structural Analysis Of Shakespeare'S Early Comedies

(USC Thesis Other)

A Structural Analysis Of Shakespeare'S Early Comedies

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SHAKESPEARE’
EARLY COMEDIES
by
Blaze Odell Bonazza
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1961
UNIVERSITY O F SO U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
.G R A D U A T E SC H O O L
U N IV ER SITY PARK
L O S A N G E L E S 7 . C A L IF O R N IA
This dissertation, written by
...B L A Z l. O D H .L..B PN A ZZA ........................
under the direction of h..%3...Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Dean of
the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of
requirements for the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
; / £ « z s r
hairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION.................................... 1
CHAPTER
I. THE COMEDY OF ERRORS..................... 12
II. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST ........... ..... 58
III. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA..................109
IV. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM....................155
LIST OF WORKS CITED...............................187
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this study of Shakespeare's early
comedies has been to follow the steps in his progress from
tentative experimentation to full competence in the craft
of fashioning popular dramatic entertainment for an Eliza
bethan audience. The investigative procedure followed
has been an inductive one based on a close reading of the
plays themselves with attention being directed to dating,
sources, textual problems, and topical allusions only to
the extent that these matters might help illuminate
obscurities relating to the playwright’s development as a
master craftsman of dramatic structure. By the term "struc
ture” is meant not simply plot mechanics, although this is
clearly central to a study of structure, but the whole
fabric of the play: the incidents and their design, the
use of characterization to further plot, the use of
language to create character and tone, and the use of
language and setting to create a motivating atmosphere.
The play was conceived of as being ideally an "organic"
unity in which all the parts play an indispensable role
in maintaining the "life" of the total organism.
It is hoped that this structural analysis will lead
to certain advantages that other methods of study might
1
2
not provide. By studying all the elements of a play and
their interaction, it might be possible to gain a greater
degree of insight into Shakespeare’s methods and their
evolution and come to a fairer appraisal of his accomplish
ments as a dramatist. First of all, it might lead to a
better understanding of the mechanics of the play— why
certain things are done at a certain time, why characters
are drawn as they are, why the particular setting is
chosen. Secondly, it might provide criteria to determine
how effectively he has combined the various elements or
indicate where he has fallen short. Thirdly, it might
illuminate the "meaning" of Shakespearean comedy since,
if there is such "meaning," it probably resides in the
entire structure of the play rather than in any of its
fragments.
Attention has been confined here to the earlier
comedies with the expectation that a pattern of develop
ment would show itself and a final, perfected scheme would
become inducible. It is assumed here that Shakespeare did
not start out as a fully competent dramatist— that he had
to learn this difficult craft gradually, .first by tinkering
with old plays and collaborating with others. Not until
he had worked with the problems of stagecraft as an
apprentice did he undertake the fashioning of plays of
his own contriving; even then he still relied heavily on
imitation. He was still not certain of the path to follow
3
because he had not yet evolved his own concept of the
comic and perfected the stage techniques to realize it.
He evolved this concept only by working it out in the
course of several highly derivative plays in which he
tried to master the practical matters of stage techniques,
of entrances and exits, of setting up his situation, of
initiating complications and conflict, of building suspense
to lead to a climactic action, and of unraveling the
tangled skein of action he had wound together. It was
this process of working his way through these early
efforts, of making mistakes and learning from them that
made it possible for this highly gifted young poet to
learn the difficult art of stagecraft just as Marlowe,
endowed with similar gifts, had struggled to learn it but
had died before he completely mastered itr f j Admittedly,
these first comedies of Shakespeare, with the exception
of A Midsummer Night's Dream, are far from the degree of
excellence of the Lest of his later ones. What is pri
marily held for them is that they show the stages in his
progress, uneven as it is, and anticipate the structure
of his mature successes in romantic comedy.
In this process of evolving a comic concept and
developing technical skill, he experimented with the
linear, farcical comedy of the Plautine pattern but found
it too uninvolved and uni-tonal to have more than a
limited appeal for his heterogeneous audience. He worked
4
with the comedy of Lyly and found that its affectations of
language and absence of dramatic intensity weakened its
appeal for a popular audience but that its subplot tech
nique was something that could be used and developed with
profit to overcome the flatness of the Plautine structure.
From this point on he had to learn to add the elements
of romance and complexity of story as Greene had shown
could be done. This he attempted in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona but discovered that he had to solve the problem
of atmosphere before he could successfully combine romance
and comedy. He solved this combination of problems bril
liantly in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Here Shakespeare
used the changes of identity of Plautine comedy, the ele
gance and beauty of language of court comedy, the parodying
subplot of Lyly, and the complicated romantic plot of the
Sidney-Greene school of romance rendered acceptable on
the stage by an agreeable dramatic climate of his own
devising.
The procedure followed in the handling of the first
three plays has been to consider initially matters of
dating, sources, textual problems, and topical allusions
as they relate to the chronology of the plays, the raw
material of the story, the theme the playwright was
attempting to handle dramatically, and the type of audience
he was trying to appeal to since these are all matters
that might conceivably influence the analysis of the
structure of the play. Once this preliminary evidence
has been examined and evaluated, the play itself has
been studied in terms of exposition, plot levels and
connections, complications and intrigues, ironic reversals
of intentions, of roles, and of fortune, comic catastrophe
and denouement, characterization, language, tone, and
atmosphere. The study of the fourth selection, A Mid
summer Nights Dream, departs from the method of inquiry
used with the three earlier plays. Here the study has
been conducted on a more theoretical and less minutely
detailed plane with the intention of summarizing what has
gone before, inducing general principles, and formulating
predictive criteria. This concluding section also
attempts to evaluate the earlier plays in the light of the
accomplishments of this finished work of dramatic art.
The results of this study would seem to support the
thesis that the development of the structure of Shakes
pearean romantic comedy can be traced, as was originally
hoped, through an analysis of the four early comedies:
The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentle
men of Verona, and A Midsummer Nights Dream. This last
play is seen as representing the first successful fusion
of the structural elements the playwright had experimented
with earlier: the use of comic reversals in a complicated
multi-level plot, the characterization of oi posing and
balancing elements, the employment of contrasting tones,
6
and the creation of a motivating atmosphere influencing
the plot and contributing to the thematic unity of the
play through the use of appropriate language.
The Comedy of Errors is primarily concerned with the
mechanics of plot, especially the manipulation and multi
plication of ironic reversals. The main agencies of plot
propulsion are seen to be a motivating circumstance out
side the main action and the liberal use of accident and
coincidence within the main action. Although characteri
zation is elementary, there is an attempt to create the
romantic heroine in the person of Luciana, Adriana's
sister. The central farcical tone connected with the
events involving the sets of twins is contrasted with a
tone of pathos by wrapping the main incidents in a serious
enveloping action involving the plight of Aegeon, the old
father of the twins, thereby giving significance to the
denouement beyond that of simple comic anagnorisis. In
this attempt to master comic reversals and to balance con
trasting tones, beauty of language is neglected except
for a few felicitous touches, and characterization is
stereotyped and rudimentary.
In Love's Labour's Lost, the main action, revolving
around the absurd compact and its failure, is counter
balanced by a parodying subplot having its own ironic
reversals and relating to the climactic reversal in the
main plot. Basically, however, action and the development
7
of dramatic suspense are sacrificed to a brilliance of
language which does little to assist in the forward move
ment and complication of incident, with the result that the
ironic reversals are episodic and only weakly climactic.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona presents a complex plot
involving a chain of related complications that lead to
multiple intrigues and derivative ironic reversals. Moti
vation for the ironic reversals comes about primarily
through physical movement rather than through any impetus
provided by functional characterization or appropriate
atmosphere. The success in complicating the main action
is offset by static exposition, an anti-comic atmosphere,
and inadequate use of characterization to help bring about
a dramatically effective resolution. The clovns in the
subplot are not used for much more than tonal contrast;
they are never given an independent line of action which
balances the main plot and contributes to a total thematic
effect.
In A Midsummer Nights Dream the problem of comic
structure is solved. The play operates on four levels
of action, each level being integrated with and balanced
against the others. Exposition is handled economically
and swiftly, comic conflicts are set up early, and the
appropriate characterization and atmosphere is created to
propel the action forward through a series of incidents
of continuing and augmenting comic suspense. These
8
incidents lead to a climactic reversal followed by an
inevitable comic catastrophe and a convincingly motivated
resolution. The enveloping action is used not merely as a
framework but also to initiate the main action, help
complicate it, absorb it when resolved, and furnish tonal
contrast. The subplots are related to the enveloping
action, to the main action, and to one another; they work
harmoniously through character, incident, and tone to
create a composite effect.
Thus, as a result of what he had learned from the
writing of the three earlier comedies, Shakespeare was
able to write a skilfully integrated multi-level, tonally
contrasting romantic comedy, A Midsummer Nights Dream.
This play, operating through the evolved structure it
represents, brings about a state of balance from con
trasting elements within the various plots, character
groupings, and tonal complexes. All this is accomplished
through the media of repeated ironic reversals arranged
climactically, motivated by both circumstance and charac
ter, and sustained by an appropriate atmosphere effected
through the power of language. All that is left to be
done in the playwright’s later successes in romantic comedy
is to elevate the romantic heroine to full equality and
thereby bring the love interest to the fore: a Julia must
be converted into a Rosalind, a Rosaline into a Beatrice,
and a Luciana into a Viola.
Some explanation of the symbols and special terms
used in the analysis of the four plays is needed here. In
the solution that Shakespeare finally reached in A Mid
summer Night's Dream, the multi-level, tonally contrasting
plot structure is seen to consist of four parts. These
parts or separate plots are represented in this study
by the letters A, B, G, and D according to their temporal
existence and function in relation to the entire play.
The A plot is the enveloping action or framework of
the entire play. It may appear first or be delayed, but
it always concerns circumstances and events that are
antecedent to those of the B plot and determinative of
them. In The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night' a
Dream, it appears first; in Love's Labour's Lost it
appears later than the B plot; in The Two Gentlemen it is
absorbed into the B plot. The primary function of the A
plot is to initiate the first movement and complication
in the B plot and eventually absorb the B plot once it is
resolved.
The B plot, or romantic love story, has its events
set within the framework of the A plot. It is motivated
and resolved by events arising within the other plots and
by characterization within its own structure. It is
related to the A and D plots primarily by incident and to
the G plot by tonal contrast. In The Comedy of Errors
and Love's Labour's Lost it is set in motion and resolved
10
by the A plot and tonally contrasted with the C plot.
In The Two Gentlemen it is resolved by an imperfectly
developed D plot and in A Midsummer Night*s Dream by a
fully developed one, and, in both, tonally contrasted with
the C plot.
The C plot, or parodying subplot, is used as an
agency to incorporate the clowns Elizabethan audiences
loved and also to provide tonal contrast to the B plot.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is also used to help
resolve the conflict within the D plot.
The D plot, or atmosphere-providing plot, operates
primarily as a moving and complicating force, but it also
has its own internal conflict which is resolved through
its interaction with one of the other plots. In A Mid
summer Night's Dream the D plot of Oberon versus Titania
is resolved by its contact with the C plot of the Athenian
mechanicals. The atmosphere the D plot provides makes
possible the incidents in the love story, and its internal
action serves as a counter-theme to that of the enveloping
plot.
Since all these elemertts do not appear together in
a fully developed form until A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the analysis to follow will often involve pointing out
how the absence of one or more elements affects the
structure of the particular play being considered. The
formula does apply in detail to the last play considered
11
in this study, and, it is hoped, may provide structural
criteria for the study of the later romantic comedies.
The formula will be used here to determine the stages in
Shakespeare's progress as a comic dramatist from early
experimentation to a finished pattern of execution in
the fashioning of romantic comedy.
CHAPTER I: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
The Comedy of Errors is generally considered to be
one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and by some to be
the earliest of his comedies. A play called A Comedy of
Errors ("like to Plautus his Menaechmus") is recorded in
the Gesta Grayorum as having been acted by a group of
players, "a company of base and common fellows," at Gray’s
Inn as part of the Christmas revels on December 28, 1594.
There is no reason to doubt that this play was Shakes
peare's The Comedy of Errors. 1 -
Although all the evidence, both external and internal,
indicates that this is an early play, there is some con
troversy over the exact year of composition. The doggerel
in Ill.i and elsewhere in the play has been adduced as
proof that the play represented a revision of an earlier
work, perhaps the lost The historie of Error played at
Paul's in 1577, or A historie of fferrar played by
Sussex's men in 1583.2 This revision theory has not
^William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill,
The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare
(Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. T ~ .
2
Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources
of Shakespeare, I (London" 1957), p. T ~ .
12
13
won much credence, and it is generally believed this is
Shakespeare’s own play, written somewhere around 1591 or
1592.
Recently the probable date of composition of 1591-92
has been under attack. Sidney Thomas argues that the play
could have been written as late as 1594 and that the Gray’s
Inn performance could have been the first one ever given.
This desire to postdate the play is based on a strong
admiration for the professional competence of the play
wright. Thomas feels that it is incredible that Shakespeare
could have begun his career with so skilful and adroit a
play.3
Regardless of the uncertainty over the exact year of
composition of the play, there should be little question
about the playwright's possession of a high degree of
professional competence. A structural analysis of the
play shows that the dramatist arranges his comic situations
skilfully so that they lead up to a climactic effect.
Allardyce Nicoll feels that at first glance one might be
tempted to pass the play with only an indulgent comment—
that it is merely a farce with no direct bearing on the
later comedies— but that a closer examination will show
that it clearly outlines the greater comedies of the
■^"The Date of The Comedy of Errors, ” Shakespeare
Quarterly, Autumn, 1956, pp. 376-384.
14
future.^
Although this play uses only two elements of the
A-C-C-D plot structure and, then, not in a multi-level
fashion, it does exhibit a relation with the later,
finished structure that first appears in A Midsummer
Nights Dream in its use of tonal contrast. Shakespeare
achieves this through the use of an enveloping action,
or plot A, which contrasts a pathetic note with the farci
cal tone of the comedy of errors of the B plot. This may
seem a trivial movement in the direction of the full
tonally contrasting, multi-level formula, but it is an
essential part of the pattern that develops later. Con
trast in tones is as important an element as coterminous
action in the fully evolved A-B-C-D pattern. In this
early effort Shakespeare uses this important device of
combining tones, thereby creating a harmonious blend
instead of the single note he found in his sources.
The plot of the comic action of the play comes from
the Menaechmi of Plautus, which was in turn probably a
redaction of a lost Greek comedy. The rather lengthy
prologue tells of an old merchant of Syracuse whose
wife gave birth to twin sons so much alike that not even
their nurse could tell them apart. When the boys were
^Shakespeare: An Introduction (New York, 1952),
p. 68.
15
about seven years old, the father took one of them with
him on a trading journey to Tarentum in southern Italy.
The little boy strayed away in the bustling market place
and was kidnapped by a rich merchant of Ephesus who took
him home with him and made him his adopted son. The
dejected father died shortly thereafter and the grandfather
renamed the remaining twin Menaechmus after himself and
the lost brother. In the meantime, the kidnapped boy
grew up in Ephesus the son of a wealthy merchant, had a
wife and dowry chosen for him, and inherited a substantial
fortune and social position on the death of his foster
father. Meanwhile Sosicles, now named Menaechmus also,
grew up in his native Syracuse. When he came of age, he
set out in company with his slave, Messenio, in search
for his long-lost brother.
The play proper opens in Epidamnus and the audience
is introduced successively to Peniculus ("sponge"), a
gluttonous parasite; Menaechmus I, a wayward husband;
Erotium ("little love"), the courtesan and mistress to
Menaechmus I; Cylindrus ("rolling-pin"), the courtesan’s
cook; Menaechmus II and Messenio, his slave; Erotium’s
maid; Mulier ("wife"), Menaechmus' wife; Senex ("old
man"), her father; and Medicus ("doctor").
The action begins with Menaechmus’ disclosure to
the parasite that he is planning a dinner rendezvous for
them both at the home of his mistress, the courtesan, for
16
whom he has stolen one of his wife's best dresses by
wearing it under his own cloak. When Menaechmus I and
Peniculus leave to pass the time until dinner drinking
at a nearby wine shop, Menaechmus of Syracuse, who has
just arrived in the city, accompanied by his slave, comes
on the scene and is mistaken for his twin by Cylindrus,
the courtesan's cook, and invited to dinner. In spite of
his slave's warning that the city is a notorious hot-bed
of thieves and swindlers, he accepts the invitation and
dines with his brother's mistress. While there, he is
given the stolen gown to be altered and a gold bracelet
to be repaired, both of which items he plans to appropriate
as his own, intending to outwit what he considers to be
a band of clever scoundrels and thieves. From the moment
Cylindrus mistakes Sosicles for Menaechmus confusion
triumphs, and while Sosicles enjoys the best of every
thing, Menaechmus is beset with a plague of misfortunes.
He is betrayed to his nagging wife by the spiteful para
site disappointed in his gluttony, locked out by both his
wife and mistress, declared insane by a quack physician,
and finally rescued only by the timely arrival of Messe
nio, who effects a cognitio or recognition in a rather
prolonged question-and-answer session in which the common
parentage of the two Menaechmi is revealed and the
confusion resolved.
As the above resume of the plot would indicate, the
17
tone of the Roman play is completely boisterous and
gross, and the cleverly contrived actions completely
selfish.
It is a realistic tale about the doings of certain
commonplace people of rather low morals and is strongly
marked by the conventions of Roman social life. The
men appropriate what they can lay their hands on; the
wife has no rights, and there is not even a suggestion,
except from her own clamorous tongue, that she is
entitled to any; the slave, a clever chap, is beaten;
there is a parasite who has attached himself to Menaech
mus the Citizen and is something of a blackmailer, and
there is a courtesan of characteristic greed and con
ventional respectability.
Menaechmus of Syracuse is as crafty and scheming as his
Epidamnian counterpart. He has no scruples whatsoever
about stealing or misrepresenting as long as his actions
meet with success. He is motivated chiefly by the self-
seeking desire of the Levant merchant to cheat in antici
pation of being cheated. _
The other characters are equally coarse and repellent.
They are interesting not in themselves but only as types.
Mulier is the customary strident-voiced shrew; Peniculus
is the conventional unscrupulous parasite motivated solely
by greed and spite. The courtesan is the materialistic,
grasping female representative of her profession; the
father is the stereotyped comically ineffectual senex
iratus; the doctor, the usual quack anxious to render the
diagnosis necessary to earn a quick fee.
Bardin Craig, An Interpretation of Shakespeare
(New York, 1948), p. 21.
18
This facile, stock characterization is to be expected
since Plautus’ play makes no pretence of being anything
other than pure farce, i.e., that type of comedy in which
the action is unrelated to character or stems from charac
ters so superficial or stereotyped that they are not
engaged in any genuinely voluntary activity but are at
the mercy of events, mostly coincidental. Since the heart
of the action depends on the absence of dissimilarities
between the Menaechmi, no attempt is made to delineate
character differences by thought, word, or action. We
have human identity reduced to the lowest possible level,
that of physical appearance, and we must assume that
human beings are somewhat less than human--they must have
some of the features of automata, as Bergson suggests, in
order for farce to succeed. They must be manipulatable
and incapable of exercising truly rational judgment.^
Since farce is situation-centered and the characters
are primarily manipulatable puppets, there is no real
focus of attention on the action of any one or two indivi
duals. It is the state of confusion resulting from the
improbable and extravagant action that attracts our
attention and we find it difficult to identify with the
weakly drawn characters. We do not care so much about
^Henri Bergson, "Laughter,” in Wylie Sypher, ed.,
Comedy (New York, 1956), p. 66.
19
what happens to a particular character as we do about the
resolution of the absurd situation.
Along with the improbability and extravagance, the
rapidity of the action affects our ability to identify
with the characters. Many of Plautus' scenes are so short
as to allow only an entrance, a few words, and then a
hasty exit. Act V, for example, has nine scenes: Menaech
mus II and Mulier appear in scene i; Mulier and Senex
appear in scene ii along with Menaechmus II; Senex alone
in iii; Senex and Medicus in iv; Menaechmus I with Senex
and Medicus in v; Messenio in vi all by himself; Senex,
slaves, Messenio, and Menaechmus I in vii; Menaechmus and
Messenio in viii; Messenio and the two Menaechmi in ix.
It is evident that this rapid shifting from one character
to the other minimizes individuals and emphasizes situa
tion.
But pure farce is not interested in delineating
subtleties of character; its sole aim is to excite
laughter, laughter of the raucous variety— "the non-reflec
tive guffaw." This laughter is excited by the ridiculous
situation always verging on violence or coarseness. It
insists that we accept the impossible as possible and
silliness as a happy substitute for sense. It neither
ridicules as does satire or burlesque nor exposes the
well-spring of human emotions as does true comedy. It
rests content if it leaves the viewer gasping for breath
20
and holding his sides, spent from laughter.^
Shakespeare attempts to shift the emphasis from
situation to character by setting the mechanical elements
of farce within a larger, more humane framework and by
trying to create more subtle characters. He begins his
play with a scene, probably borrowed from the story of
Apollonius of Tyre found in Gower or Twine, in which
Aegeon, an elderly merchant of Syracuse, pathetically
explains his presence in Ephesus. He tells the Duke,
who has condemned him to death as a merchant from a
hostile city, that some twenty-five years previously his
wife had given birth to twin sons while they were in
Epidamnus. As attendants for his own sons he had bought
the twin sons of a poor woman lodging in the same inn.
On their return voyage, their ship had been sunk in a
violent storm. He had managed to save one son and one
infant slave by lashing them and himself to a spar,
and his wife had done likewise with herself and the other
two infants. He and his charges were rescued and taken
to Epidaurus; his wife and the other two infants were
picked up at sea and carried away by a Corinthian fishing
boat. When the son rescued with the father reached
eighteen, he left Syracuse, with his father’s permission
7
Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton,
1956), p. 19.
21
and in company with his slave, to search for his brother.
Hearing no word from his son for two anxious years, the
old man wandered about for five years more in vain search
for his lost family. His quest had brought him to Ephesus
and to his death sentence because of the trade war. After
hearing this woeful tale, the Duke grants the old man a
day in which to raise the ransom money to purchase his
freedom.
Antipholus of Syracuse, the old man’s son, has also
just arrived in Ephesus with his slave, Dromio. The youth
is unaware of his father's presence in the city and of
the presence of his long-lost brother for whom he has been
fruitlessly searching for seven years. He sends his slave
to an inn with their money and, while alone, is summoned
by his brother's identical slave to come home to dinner.
He becomes angered at what he believes to be an ill-timed
practical joke and gives the slave a sound drubbing.
The physically chastized and thoroughly confused
Dromio returns home complaining of the beating and here
he is further upbraided by his impatient mistress for the
annoying delay at the dinner table. In the meantime, the
Syracusian Dromio, on his return from the inn, is beaten
for denying he had invited his master to dine with a
supposed wife. Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus,
and her sister, Lucianna, come in search of the presumed
husband and virtually brow-beat him and his slave into
22
accompanying them home.
During the mismated dinner, the real husband and
his dinner companions are denied entrance and ordered
away. The angry husband decides to dine at the cour
tesan's and asks Angelo, the goldsmith, to bring along
a gold chain which he had intended as a gift for his wife
but which he now plans to give to the courtesan instead.
Inside the house, Antipholus of Syracuse is attempting
to woo the perplexed sister and Dromio is being amorously
pursued by the ugly kitchen maid. Angelo returns from
his shop, finds the wrong Antipholus at the house, and
forces the gold chain upon him.
Angelo, encountering a merchant who demands instant
payment for a debt owing to him, goes in search of Anti
pholus of Ephesus and requests payment for the gold chain
of the dumfounded citizen. Payment is naturally refused
and Antipholus is arrested on Angelo’s complaint to the
accompanying officer. At this moment the wrong slave
appears and he is sent for bail money. Meanwhile the
courtesan comes upon the twin in possession of the gold
chain and she demands it in payment for a ring she had
given the other Antipholus at dinner. When she is rudely
denied, she seeks out Adriana claiming that Antipholus is
deranged. When Dromio of Ephesus returns with a rope he
had been sent for earlier instead of with the bail money
the other Dromio had gone after, he receives another
23
beating.
Adriana, Luciana, the courtesan, and Pinch, who has
been retained to exorcise the demons in possession of the
presumably demented Antipholus, now come on the scene.
The enraged citizen and his slave are seized and taken
away bound and restrained by Pinch and servants. When the
other Antipholus and Dromio appear on the scene immediately
thereafter with swords drawn, Adriana and Luciana run off
in fear believing that the violently raging husband and
slave have escaped their guards and are intent on doing
them mischief.
Angelo reappears and confronts the Antipholus who
has possession of the chain and accuses him of bald
deceit and misrepresentation. Adriana and Luciana reappear
and the frightened master and slave, suspecting them of
sorcery, seek sanctuary in a nearby priory. The abbess of
the priory refuses to deliver the refugees over to their
pursuers and Adriana appeals to the Duke, who is passing
by with Aegeon and others on the way to the place of
execution. The Ephesian master and slave now come on the
scene and appeal for redress of grievances. There is
considerable confusion based on statement and counter
statement until the abbess appears with the Syracusians.
The recognition leads to a joyous reunion, the liberation
of the unfortunate Aegeon, and the suggestion of the
impending nuptials of Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana.
24
A comparison of the plot summaries discloses that
Shakespeare has divided the dramatic emphasis between
situation and story, with the latter receiving less
emphasis. The classical play had revolved entirely about
situation and incident and the tone was hard and cynical,
the series of callous chicaneries of the various charac
ters being capped by Sosicles* suggestion to Menaechmus
that he abandon his wife, sell his possessions, and accom
pany him to Syracuse. By placing the events of the pro
logue within the play itself, as had already been done in
Italian versions® such as I Simillimi of Trissino and
La Moglie of Cecchi, Shakespeare is following the tendency
of medieval romance to tell a story from the very begin
ning to the end and, by so doing, he also changes the tone
from the coarse to the pathetic. The playwright, even in
a work derived primarily from classical sources, refuses
to be cramped by the restraint imposed by the Greco-Roman
stage conventions: instead of being confined into the
one form of complicated situation resolving, he chooses
to follow the involved story line of romance. As Muriel
Bradbrook says:
He was confronted with the alternatives of Italian
tradition, with all its prestige and its ready models,
or the shapeless native popular play, in which material
designed for narrative was struggling to accommodate
^Bullough, p. 6.
25
itself to dramatic f o r m .9
Thus in this early work we can already see the
pattern of Shakespearean comedy evolving, i.e., the
amalgamation of incident with romance or story tinged
with the marvelous. Here the full story for its own sake
is incorporated into the dramatic situation, made part of
it, and made to bear on the central incidents within the
play. It is easy to notice how the strong influence of
romance, as seen in the element borrowed from Apollonius
of Tyre, has swept aside all limitations of the classical
dramatic form. Now there is no longer any obstacle to
the intermingling of comic and tragic tones.
In Plautus all of the action in the play is contained
within a single plot with the beginning of the story being
relegated to a tongue-in-cheek prologue and the ending
dismissed with a flippant proposal. In Shakespeare four
separate but related plots, i.e., the arrest, scheduled
execution, and salvation of Aegeon;~ the misunderstandings
and resolution of the mistaken identities; the estrange
ment by jealousy and the reconciliation by love of the
husband and wife; and the wooing and winning of Luciana,
are interwoven into a single main plot. The peril and
Q
The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy
(London, 1955), p. 77.
■^Richard G. Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare
(New York, 1907), p. 167.
release of Aegeon is at the core of the serious action;
it impinges on the comic action, resolves it, and is
resolved in turn by it. The jealousy of Adriana leads
to the estrangement from her husband and this in turn
contributes to the complications of the comic action.
The resolution of the comic action leads to a happy cul
mination of the embryonic love plot involving Antipholus
of Syracuse and Luciana. The various elements of the plot
are not all adequately developed and the pattern remains
relatively simple, but the effort shows the future bent
of the playwright's mind and offers promise of a later
harmonious complexity of plot construction.
This attempt at a harmonious complexity of plot
construction can best be seen by a structural analysis
of the various incidents within the play, disclosing their
relationship to one another and to the entire play. In
the first scene the playwright is concerned with laying
the groundwork of the enveloping or serious action, i.e.,
the pathetic plight of Aegeon, and to indicate the basis
of the internal or comic action, i.e., the mistaken iden
tities. This two-fold objective is accomplished through
a slender trial scene consisting mostly of exposition and
stage setting for the final dual resolution. Aegeon is
the first to speak and the audience is immediately
informed that he is being sentenced to death. Since this
is a comedy, the audience by convention realizes and
27
expects that somehow this threatened execution will be
averted no matter how inevitable it might seem on first
acquaintance with the situation. The audience takes it
for granted that the dramatist will sow the seeds of the
eventual solution to the problem in the first scene. By
doing so, the playwright provides his audience with the
pleasure of anticipating how the happy resolution can be
effected.
The Duke's first words inform us that Aegeon is a
merchant of Syracuse hence subject to death for being
apprehended in Ephesus. The existence of a trade war
sets the necessity of the harsh penalty and exonerates
the Duke of the charge of tyrannical cruelty. Northrup
Frye points out how common it is for the action of a
Shakespearean comedy to begin with some absurd, cruel,
or irrational law which the action of the comedy then
evades or breaks.H The Duke is here represented as being
reluctantly forced to carry out the stern mandate even
though by nature he is a merciful man. In this way the
mood appropriate to the breaking of the law is established.
Any pathos that might still be built up, however, is
allayed by his saying,
Again, if any Syracusian born
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies,
^• ^The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1959), p. 166.
28
His goods confiscate to the Duke’s dispose,
Unless a thousand marks be levied,
To quit the penalty and to ransom him.
(I.i.19-23)
The audience is secure in the belief that somehow the
fine will be paid and the unfortunate old man rescued
from death.
The next thing for the playwright to establish is
when and how this will happen. With Aegeon’s words, "My
woes end likewise with the evening sun." (I.i.28), the
audience is made aware of the time limitations that will
govern the ensuing action. With lines 29 ff. the Duke
by interrogating the condemned man establishes the "how"
of the happy resolution. His gratuitous questioning pro
vides the entre for a long expository section which has
no legal bearing on the trial or the penalty but which
is dramatically necessary to set the stage for the inter
nal action and to prepare the audience for the comedy of
errors arising from the improbable existence of two sets
of identical twins whose destinies are closely woven
together. Aegeon obliges with a fully detailed account
of the motivating circumstances lying behind his coming
to Ephesus. He has come in search of his two long lost
sons ". . . the one so like the other / As could not be
distinguished but by names." Here the dramatist is
guilty of carelessness in a significant detail. From
this remark we are led to assume that the twins were
29
given different names; yet when we meet them in the play,
we find they have the same name. For the mistaken iden
tities in the internal action to occur, identical names
are necessary and the playwright forgets to provide for
this detail. Plautus had solved this simply by mentioning
the renaming of one twin after his brother was lost.
Shakespeare forgets to do so, but in the hustle-and-bustle
of the comic action the omission is overlooked. The main
purpose of this portion of the exposition is, of course,
to convince the audience that since not even the parents
could tell the children apart, all kinds of confusion
can be expected to re.sult from this remarkable similarity.
Furthermore, the birth of another set of twins in
the same inn on the same night that Aegeon’s sons are
born forewarns the audience to suspend the laws of
probability for the sake of entertainment and to be
willing to expect all sorts of coincidences based on
the original one.
Under the semblance of dramatic dialogue between
the Duke and the overwrought Aegeon, the long expository
speech of the latter is momentarily interrupted. This is
done both for the benefit of the audience and of the actor
playing the part of the old man. The one would become
bored and restless with too long an uninterrupted account;
the other would have difficulty remembering such a lengthy
tale without some cue or change of tack. Later on
30
Shakespeare learns to handle his exposition more adroitly
but here he is still a relative novice. Aegeon goes on
to tell of the motivating circumstances behind the entire
play, i.e., the storm at sea, the conventional ship
wreck,^ the rescue, and separation. The Duke is an
exhaustive prober— all for the benefit of the audience.
The dramatist uses him as a stalking-horse to elicit the
full details of the enveloping action and to provide the
material for the credibility of the forthcoming internal
action.
Of the total 139 lines in the scene, 104 are spoken
by Aegeon. The Duke's remarks are only to elicit back
ground material of the doomed man's life, to provide
further exposition of his own, and to prefigure the solu
tion to the execution complication in the alternative which
he offers. On the surface, this alternative seems tanta
mount to another death penalty since the prisoner is a
stranger in an alien land. But the audience has been
rendered receptive to coincidence and, knowing of the
existence of the twin sons, is prepared for the old man's
liberation and happy reunion with his family. When the
Duke s ays,
Therefore, merchant, I'll limit thee this day
To seek thy life by beneficial help.
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus;
12Frye, p. 184.
31
Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum
And live; if no, then thou art doom'd to die.
(I.i.151-55)
the audience is assured that justice will somehow be
tempered with mercy. It realizes that as a stranger Aegeon
has no friends in Ephesus and if he is to be saved, as
surely he must be since this is a comedy, he must encounter
his wandering son, the long-lost son, his wife, or most
happily and most likely all of them. Since all of them
escaped death in the shipwreck, reunion is demanded by
convention. The playwright's task is to bring about this
reunion but it must not be done too soon or the tension-
building possibilities will come to nothing. The inevi
table must be postponed until the internal action has
been drained of its last comic possibility. When this
occurs, the internal action will terminate in a juncture
with the enveloping action centered about Aegeon's plight
and impending execution at sunset.
Antipholus of Syracuse and his Dromio are the first
to be introduced in the internal action of the play.
Their presence affords an immediate opportunity to tie
the enveloping action in with the internal action. Here
the audience sees the twin the father had reared until
he had left in search of his brother some seven years
previously. To forestall the question of why he too is
not apprehended as an enemy alien, the playwright uses
the device of having the First Merchant warn him of
32
Aegeon’s fate and of the necessity for pretending to be
from Epidamnum rather than from the hostile city of
Syracuse. In this speech the merchant also serves to
establish the time for the audience once again, i.e., the
action must take place in the course of a single day, for
the doomed Aegeon ’ ’ Dies ere the weary sun set in the
west" (I.ii.7).
With Antipholus of Syracuse’s first speech the inter
nal action is set into motion. To provide the audience
with its first view of one of the pairs of twins, Dromio
of Syracuse must be sent from the stage on some pretext
or other so that his double can appear and the audience
thus see Aegeon’s account of identical twins come to life
before its eyes. To effect this necessary departure Dromio
is given specific instructions, "and stay there, Dromio,
till I come to thee," (I.ii.10). This serves as a signal
to the audience: by this caution it knows that any Dromio
reappearing shortly on the stage will be the twin from
Ephesus. Antipholus provides himself with an excuse to
"view the manners of the town" thus permitting occasion
to develop whereby he will be mistaken for his counter
part. The audience is required to accept the stipulation
that the two masters never meet throughout the internal
action. Coincidence is to operate only to bring master
and slave together, never master and master or slave and
slave. On Dromio’s departure his master remarks on his
33
trustworthiness and his tendency to practical joking.
This rather unsubtle bit of characterization is introduced
to prepare for the credibility of the later confusion of
identities. At this point it is important that the First
Merchant be provided with an excuse to leave the stage,
otherwise he would be present to testify to the true
identity of Antipholus of Syracuse and the comic conflict
would not materialize. In a sense, the comic hero must
be isolated to meet his fate.
In Antipholus* short soliloquy, MI to the world am
like a drop of water/ That in the ocean seeks another
drop," the audience is informed through irony and metaphor
that its expectations will be realized, that this one
clrop of water will meet its counterpart as unlikely as
it may seem on the surface. In fact, this is the theme
of the entire comedy: strange and comical events will
transpire once unrestrained coincidence has its sway,
but eventually all will turn out well.
When Dromio reappears on the scene after specific
instructions to stay at the inn until joined by his
master, the audience realizes, although Antipholus does
not, that this is the other slave that Aegeon spoke of.
The audience, by benefit of the lengthy exposition in
scene i, knows more than does Antipholus of Syracuse;
therefore, it can accept this coincidence, in fact take
pleasure in anticipating it. Dromio*s remarks are
34
interpreted as an ill-times jest in accordance with
Antipholus’ previous analysis of the slave’s character
with its tendency toward ’ ’ merry jesting.” The audience,
being wiser than either participant in the action, sees
the confusion inherent in the situation and takes delight
in the comic possibilities. That a master should be
annoyed at the supposed intransigence of a slave he never
gave orders to involves a dual reversal of intention.
He intends to reprimand a recalcitrant slave in order
to secure obedience and respect, but instead he scolds
a tractable one and receives resentment and anger. Dromio
intends to summon his master to dinner, but instead invites
a total stranger.
With this scene the pattern of the comic action is
established: the characters in their attempts to act in
accordance with commonsense will experience repeated
reversals of intention and of fortune. Repetition will
be the keynote of the comic action. Not just one or two
but all of the characters will experience one or more
reversals. The playwright will utilize his donne, the
physical repetition of individuals, of master and slave,
to produce repetition of incident. The audience has seen
the first reversal of intention in the slave’s invitation
to the wrong master and the first reversal of fortune in
the beating he receives. It can now anticipate a series
of similar comic reversals, comic because of their
35
repetitiveness and also because of their intrinsic variance
from commonsense expectations. Although the basic element
is the repetition of reversals, this principle of action
must obviously be used with variations. These can be
achieved by a shifting of scenes and characters so that
the force of the original improbability draws all the
characters into a widening circle of involvement. The
audience as the arbiter of commonsense is moved to
laughter by the thwarted anticipations and annoying frus
trations of the characters as they undergo the various
reversals. Laughter results from the fact that the
violation of commonsense expectations leads not to disas
ter but only to temporary discomfiture and distress.
The mention of the sum of money entrusted to Dromio
serves a two-fold purpose. It is the cause of the comic
misunderstanding between the master and the wrong slave,
and it also serves to remind the audience of the enveloping
action. It recalls the fact that the condemned man needed
a thousand marks to procure his freedom and now it is seen
that his son is present in the same city with exactly that
sum of money on hand. With these two facts at its dispo
sal, the audience is furnished with the clues necessary
for it to anticipate a happy conclusion to the enveloping
action it witnessed in scene i. In the meantime, however,
it looks forward to being entertained by the complications
promised by the internal action.
36
The act ends with Antipholus of Syracuse providing
himself with an explanation for this confusing occurrence
involving his slave’s recalcitrance: he interprets it
as an indication that witchcraft is rampant in this evil
city, a notion that Shakespeare may have taken from
Acts XIX which tells of St. Paul’s missionary visits to
Ephesus.13 This explanation is important to the action;
once Antipholus has abjured a logical interpretation of
these weird events, they can continue to occur and he will
be ready to accept them as inevitable and beyond logical
inquiry and effective countermeasures. Furthermore, out
of fear of worse mischief, he will even be forced to go
along with some of the suggestions of these necromancers.
Without this acquiescence on his part some of the sub
sequent events, e.g., his dining with Adriana and Luciana
and his acceptance of the gold chain from Angelo would be
too unmotivated to warrant audience acceptance.
Scene i, Act II re-emphasizes the identity of the
Dromio who had requested the presence of Antipholus of
Syracuse at dinner. The audience, although it already
knew as much, is reminded that the slave had invited the
wrong master. The time element is again stressed, it now
being mid-afternoon of our dramatic day. Adriana and
Luciana are characterized by their dialogue as being of
l ^ K e n n e t h Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources, I (London,
1957), p. 19.
37
antipodal dispositions--the one jealous and shrewish, the
other tolerant and gentle. Luciana delivers a homily on
the rightful subjection of women to their husbands and
in so doing establishes her availability and desirability
as a matrimonial prospect for the unmarried Antipholus.
Adriana must be shrewish enough to alienate her husband's
affections but not enough to lose him; Luciana must be
appealing enough to attract the attention of the foreign
Antipholus so that further complications are possible and
so that a love element can be added to the internal action.
At the conclusion of this scene, Adriana mentions the
gold chain which is later to play an important part in
further ensnarling the action. A reversal of intention
is seen brewing as a product of Adriana's extreme posses
siveness. She would rather have her husband's love than
his gift of the gold chain, but later this chain serves
as a symbol of his supposedly errant love when the cour
tesan claims it had been promised to her. Later Adriana
is in danger of having neither her husband’s love nor
the chain because of her unwitting exclusion of him from
their home, which is motivated by this extreme possessive
ness. By seeking to hang on to her husband so tenaciously
she almost succeeds in losing him.
Scene ii of Act II employs another reversal of
intention in Antipholus’ attempt tc gain an admission of
pranking from his befuddled slave. Instead of achieving
38
a solution to the mystery by gaining such an admission,
he receives further conflicting testimony in Dromio*s
flat denial of any encounter with his master since his
errand to the inn with the thousand marks.
This same scene exhibits the first in a series of
repeated reversals of fortune for Dromio. From a state
of happy concord with his master he is precipitously
beaten and cast into disfavor. Ironic contrast is gained
from the realization that slaves are rightfully beaten
when they deceive or defy their masters but in these two
beatings, i.e., the one administered to Dromio of Ephesus
for the dinner invitation and the one administered to the
other Dromio for his alleged lying, the slave is being
punished for strict obedience to the commands of his
master. He has performed his errand faithfully and well
but he is beaten. The audience is aware of this incon
gruity and the humor of the situation arises from the
recognition of these ridiculous reversals of fortune and
the eminent likelihood of others to follow in their wake.
Antipholus of Syracuse has verified the deposit of the
gold at the inn and Adriana has verified the delay at
the dinner table, thus informing the audience that both
beatings followed upon implicit obedience on the part of
the slave.
We have been prepared for Adriana*s rejection by
Antipholus because her slave had reported that his master
39
had forsworn his wife. She interprets this not as a
literal denial of their marriage or her identity but as
an indication to her jealous nature of the transference
of her husband's affections to some other woman. Thus
when she confronts him, the audience is prepared to accept
her forbearance of his blatant denial of her. Dromio's
protest against his master's unprovoked and apparently
irrational beating of him is inserted here to prepare
Adriana for the courtesan's later assertion that her
husband is mad.
Confusion is compounded for Antipholus of Syracuse
when his slave denies having previously given him a
dinner invitation. This additional confusion reinforces
the notion of witchcraft in his mind, and to investigate
the sorcery further he agrees to accompany Adriana and
Luciana. This simple expedient actually represents a
skilful solution to the difficult problem of getting the
wrong husband into the house with the wife’s compliance
and even insistence and yet avoiding the problem of
adulterous conduct. In Shakespeare's source for this
section in Amphitruo Alcmena submits to Jupiter, who has
assumed the outward form of her husband. ^ The playwright,
at this early stage of his dramatic development, is not
interested in coping with a moral issue that might
■^Bullough, p. 7.
40
interfere with the comic action of the play. He further
provides against skirting the problem of adulterous
conduct too closely by creating the character of Luciana
to serve as the legitimate object of the amorous atten
tions of the wandering Antipholus.
Dromio reinforces the witchcraft theme by mentioning
the dire consequences to those who refuse to do the
bidding of goblins and sprites. In this manner the
acceptance of the dinner invitation is motivated and the
exclusion of the rightful husband is anticipated.
Adriana here suffers a comic reversal of intention.
She hopes to win back her supposedly errant husband’s
affections by getting him to come home with her, but
instead she succeeds in performing an act which will
definitely alienate him from her, viz., inviting a com
plete stranger into the privacy of her home. Luciana,
conversely, experiences a fortunate reversal of intention.
In attempting to reconcile her sister and brother-in-law,
she succeeds in helping attract to their home an eligible
young bachelor who is very strongly affected by her charm
of manner and her beauty. To her it appears to be an
unfortunate reversal but to the audience it is clear that
it is an auspicious one.
Here also can be seen the mingling of tones which
the playwright is experimenting with. To the ludicrous
tone of the basic comic plot he is adding a note of
41
romantic love not yet fully sustaining but striving
toward the lyric level in Antipholus’ wooing:
0, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,
To drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;
Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I’ll take them and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think
He gains by death that hath such means to die.
(III.ii.45-51)
This eloquent appeal strikes a note completely foreign
to classical notions of the love of a man for a woman.
Its suggestion of idealization of the love object is much
at variance with the Roman carnal view of sex relations
and it reflects a Renaissance attitude traceable to the
influence of the love lyrics of Petrarch, Dante, and the
Provencal poets. ^
The closing lines of Act II had been a warning to
Dromio not to let anyone into the house under penalty of
another beating. In view of the previous beatings, the
audience is made aware that the slave will enforce these
orders rigidly, thereby setting up the incongruous situa
tion in which the husband is locked out of his own house
as Mulier threatened she would do in the Menaechmi. In
this reversal of intention Adriana wants to secure privacy
with her husband and keep all others away. In attempting
to achieve this, however, she succeeds only in excluding
I5H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (New York,
1938), p. 110.
42
the one person she wants most to be with. The device
here used of one slave denying entrance to his identical
counterpart had been used in Amphitruo where Mercury
assumes the form of the slave Sosia while Jupiter is with
Alcmena and gets him to deny his own identity. Here the
difference is that Shakespeare does not have the two
slaves confront one another directly since such an
encounter would defeat the mechanics of the plot.
Antipholus of Ephesus is accompanied by Balthazar
and Angelo, the goldsmith. The presence of these com
panions serves two dramatic purposes. In the first place,
the testimony of these two witnesses will be used later
to refute Adriana's protest that she had not bolted the
door against her own husband. Furthermore, through the
comic disparity between the fulsome invitation tendered
by the host and the rude rejection proffered by the
servants, Antipholus' countermeasure is provided with a
motivating circumstance. The threat of breaking down
the gate, a solution that would prematurely end the
laughable confusion, has to be nullified. This is the
dramatic justification for Balthazar's presence in the
scene. He is here to serve as an unwitting perpetrator
of the confusion. It Is a subtle reversal of intention
that the most moderate of suggestions and the most sen
sible of courses of action should be precisely the thing
that furthers the nonsense. Balthazar's intention is to
43
preserve his friend's reputation as a responsible citizen
by avoiding a street brawl with his wife. Actually his
suggestion of their departure at this time ends the pos
sibility of an immediate solution to the problem and
sets up the loss of reputation suffered by Antipholus
over the incident of the gold chain. This departure moti
vates the dinner at the courtesan's home and brings her
into the action as a further embroiling factor. Thus
we see how the playwright has skilfully used-commonsense
behavior set against a background of confusion to per
petuate the confusion.
The principle of action involving the repetition
of reversals, besides being used with variations, must also
be used with a sense of dramatic climax if it is to pro
duce the maximum comic effect. The reversals must occur
in a crescendo pattern: they must start with the rela
tively trivial and lead up to the significant and conse
quential. It is not too significant or consequential
that a master administer a beating to the wrong slave.
It is not too important that a slave issue a dinner
invitation to the wrong master so long as the invitation
is not accepted. But when two more centrally involved
characters appear and repeat the invitation and thereby
suffer a reversal of intention, the significance of the
reversal is heightened because of its consequences and
the degree of hilarity rises because of these greater
44
consequences. These more significant consequences reach
their peak in the climactic reversal of intention that
occurs when one primary character takes steps against
another primary character in an important action. The
essence of the comic is here the same as it is in the
lesser reversals— there is a disruption of the commonsense
pattern of behavior--but the comic effect is heightened
by the skilful order of climax proceeding from the most
trivial to the most consequential reversal. There is
nothing haphazard about this pattern of reversals; all
is arranged so as to lead logically to one climactic
reversal, which in turn leads to a resolution.
This scene contains the dramatic climax of the absurd
situation. Antipholus* exclusion from his own home rep
resents the turning-point in the action. It sends him
in the direction of the courtesan who becomes one of the
resolving forces in the confusion. It is she who brings
Adriana out of the house and into the city, where ultimately
she can be confronted with both Antipholi. All mistakes
in identity subsequent to this one lead to an unwinding
of the mechanism and can result only in the comic "catas
trophe** of the meeting of the twins.
When mention of the chain is made as they stand
outside the house, Angelo discloses that he does not have
it with him. In the world of normal nishaps one might
expect him to be carrying it with him since it is a gift
45
intended for his friend and client’s wife. Dramatically,
however, it serves the playwright’s purpose to have
Angelo go in quest of it because by so doing he creates
the possibility of a coincidental encounter with the
other Antipholus, which encounter is necessary to further
the comedy of errors. Getting the gold chain into the
right hands at this stage of the action is exactly what
the dramatist does not want. He needs an object to draw
the courtesan into the action so that she can act as an
unwitting conciliator, a clear reversal of roles for the
femme fatale.
The romantic love theme of the Antipholus-Luciana
center of action is parodied in the pursuit of Dromio by
the kitchen-maid wife of his twin. The second pursuit
is the comic inversion of the first. In both cases the
pursued is unwilling. Luciana's resistance is motivated
by a'supererogatory sense of honor not by an inherent
repulsion for her suitor; Dromio's attempt to escape is
prompted not by any finer scruples but simply because his
pursuer is coarse and ugly. Some of the comic effect of
the pursuit of Dromio owes its origin to the obvious
reversal of the roles in courtship, i.e., the male in
this instance is the fleeing nymph, the female is the
pursuing satyr. The reversal of roles in itself is
comic provided the results are trivial or that any
threatening serious complications are averted by mischance,
46
coincidence, external rescue, etc. Here the underlying
adultery theme is rendered trivial by the sheer ludicrous-
ness of the situation. The kitchen maid is a mere buffoon
and she is there merely to contribute to the merriment not
to play any real role in the main action.
When Angelo returns with the gold chain, Antipholus
of Syracuse is standing outside his brother's house with
no one else on stage. Again the audience is confronted
with the fact of the isolation of the comic hero and anti
cipates another reversal of intention. The playwright has
to plan this scene so that there will be no witnesses to
the transaction. Were Adriana present, she could claim
the chain directly. Such a legitimate disposition of this
object would thwart the subsequent lazzi^ or "stage busi
ness” it makes possible. Antipholus accepts the chain to
avoid further trouble in this land of Lapland witches, but
his intention is reversed for he is performing an act
which will plunge him directly into trouble, with the
courtesan and with Angelo again.
The necessity for creating the character of the
Second Merchant, who appears in Act IV, scene i, is obvi
ous. The playwright needs some means of initiating
conflict between Angelo and Antipholus over payment for
the chain. Without the pressure of time being introduced
^Hughes, p. 21.
47
there would be less opportunity of precipitating another
occasion for false identification, confusion, and comic
conflict. Again the time of day is established— it is
some time before five o’clock. The audience is reminded
that the day is hastening to a close and that a rapid
precipitation of events must occur in time for the doomed
Aegeon, the central figure in the enveloping action, to
be spared at sundown by a coming together of the events
and characters of the enveloping action with those of the
internal.
No sooner does Antipholus of Ephesus reappear on the
scene than he despatches Dromio on an errand, leaving the
way open again for the return of the wrong slave. This
departure also serves to perpetuate the confusion by
isolating him and depriving him of a witness who might
refute the testimony of Angelo. The failure-to-perform-
an-errand theme is repeated here on a higher level, with
Angelo being upbraided for failing to fulfill his mission.
A comic reversal of intention is created in Angelo’s
insisting on the arrest of Antipholus. He does so to make
certain he will get his money, yet since this Antipholus
has not actually received the goods, he is trying to get
the money from the wrong man and is leaving himself vul
nerable to the possibility of losing all his money and
possessions through a legal suit for false arrest. The
audience never considers this possibility in a serious
48
light, however, because of its superior knowledge and
anticipation that all will be set right when the dual
set of twins confront one another.
With the return of Dromio of Syracuse to the stage
we witness another reversal of intention. He is immedi
ately sent on another errand, despite his protest that
their ship is waiting for them in the harbor. In being
sent to Adriana for the bail money he is forced to return
to the place he was so anxious to escape from. By seeking
out his master he had hoped to hasten his safe departure
from this hag-ridden city; instead he is thrown back into
the situation he dreaded most.
In scene ii of this act an attempt is made to render
Adriana more sympathetic and less of a conventional shrew
by showing that her jealousy is motivated by love for
her husband. Even in the face of strong cause for jea
lousy in Luciana’s revelations, her actions are dominated
by an acceptance of her husband's faults and an earnest
desire to hold on to him. Her patience and forbearance
at this point, however, seem strangely inappropriate and
we cannot help but feel that the playwright has manipu
lated character a little too clumsily in order to fit her
actions into the requirements of the plot. He must have
her go in search for her husband and this tolerant,
solicitous attitude is needed to furnish motivation for
her doing so, thus eventually bringing about the resolution
49
and reconciliation.
In scene iii the courtesan serves as a link between
Adriana and Antipholus. The liaison between her and Anti-
pholus has been lightened from that in the Menaechmi to
permit an easy reconciliation between the estranged man
and wife. When the existence of the twin is disclosed,
the courtesan will not serve as any obstacle to the reunion
of husband and wife: it is only explainable error that
estranges them, not infidelity or lack of affection. The
courtesan is here used to add to the charge of madness
against Antipholus alleged earlier by Dromio upon his
return home following his beating over the dinner invi
tation he had given to the wrong master. In this way the
playwright completes the pattern which permits the con
fusions to be self-perpetuating: Antipholus of Syracuse
has accepted the strange events as evidences of witch
craft; the others assign the aberrant behavior to madness
on the part of the Ephesian citizen. Shakespeare uses
madness differently than Plautus has done. He has the
diagnosis inflicted on the innocent Antipholus; whereas
Plautus had Sosicles feign madness to outwit his gulls.
The one’s use of madness adds to the ludicrousness of the
situation, the other’s adds to the cynical and crass tone.
Act IV opens with another comic reversal of fortune.
Dromio of Ephesus expects to be in his master’s good
graces for performing the rope errand, but instead he
50
finds himself in disfavor again with a body beating
administered for his pains. The Ephesian master had
expected to be released from arrest on his slave’s arrival
with the bail money but the arrival brings a ridiculous
piece of rope "out of time and out of place" and his
arrest becomes definite. The arrival of Adriana is a
false token of a happy reversal of fortune for Antipholus.
When she sees him beating Dromio, the faithful slave who
had come home for his master’s bail, she is convinced that
the courtesan's allegations of madness are correct. Her
husband must be mad, for only a madman would punish a
slave for doing what he is told. Everything Antipholus
does in this encounter only succeeds in confirming her
worst fears. Everything he does and says is intended to
secure his freedom but instead it only assures his con
tinued imprisonment. Beside the reversal of intention
here there is also a reversal of roles. Antipholus accuses
his wife of the very act he has been guilty of, namely,
consorting with a paramour. The incongruity of the sallow
Pinch as her paramour adds to the ridiculousness of the
charge.
The confusion is deepened when Dromio confirms his
master's insistence that they had been excluded from
their own home but refutes his master's contention that
he had sent him to Adriana for bail. In attempting to
exonerate his master, Dromio's efforts are reversed and he
51
succeeds only in giving further evidence to the charge of
madness and including himself in the diagnosis. The more
vigorously the pair contest the diagnosis, the more
accurate it seems. In struggling violently to preserve
their liberty they do the very thing which justifies the
others in depriving them of liberty, and they end up bound
and tied to be hauled off by the officious Pinch. The
immediately ensuing arrival of the other Antipholus and
Dromio with swords drawn serves to establish in the minds
of Adriana, Luciana, the courtesan, and officer the cor
rectness of the diagnosis and the dangerous aspects of
the madness of the two men who have just escaped necessary
and humane confinement.
In the last act the playwright's task is to immobilize
one master-slave combination so that the other pair can be
brought to the same spot and the true nature of the con
fusing situation become apparent. He accomplishes this
by having Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio seek sanctuary
in the priory from what they believe to be acts of sorceryr
The homily on wifely duty delivered by the abbess to
Adriana is a counterpart to Luciana's earlier remarks. It
serves to reinforce her remarks on wifely submission by
having them uttered by an older person wise in the ways of
marital decorum and sanctified by her church connections.
She serves as a univocal chorus to echo the mores of the
audience's society. The abbess through skilful questioning
52
speciously turns Adriana's own words against her so that
she admits to guilt for provoking her husband to madness.
She is now a subdued and tractable wife instead of a
strident-voiced termagant and a happy reunion is in order
now that she has been reformed. There are no other
obstacles to this reunion since the liason with the cour
tesan had earlier been structured as an innocuous dinner
engagement.
The abbess' refusal to liberate her charges upon the
demand of Adriana is a device to bring the Duke into the
internal action. His is the only authority that can super
sede that of the abbess. Up until now his role has been
that of a stage-setter and prompter in the expository part
of the enveloping action. The merchant's mention of the
hour being five brings back the time of Aegeon's execution
and correlates the two plots temporally. The solution to
both the internal and enveloping action must now be
effected. With the Duke's arrival we are reminded that
payment of the sum of one thousand marks will save the
condemned man's life. The audience will soon be rewarded
for its indulgence in anticipating the saving of the
father's life by his own sons.
The arrival of the messenger with the news that
Antipholus and Dromio have escaped their bonds is the
harbinger of the solution. Adriana already "knows" they
have escaped by virtue of her own senses and sanity about
53
which there is no question. This new confusing bit of
news cannot be attributed to her husband’s ’ ’ madness" and
calls for a flat rejection of its truth or for further
investigation along commonsense lines that will produce
the right answer. With one set of twins immobilized in
the priory, the appearance of the other set on the scene
brings an end to the playwright’s adroit manipulations.
The presence of both sets in the same place at the same
time is the thing that he scrupulously avoided for four
previous acts; now he just as sedulously pursues its
realization. The comedy of errors has depended on the
concatenation of coincidences which permitted master to
encounter slave but never permitted master to encounter
master or slave to encounter slave. With the Duke on the
scene, the playwright is equipped with a resolving agent.
The Duke need do nothing more than command that the abbess
bring forth her charges.
Before the happy denouement, however, the comedy
comes near pathos in Aegeon’s fruitless appeal for aid to
Antipholus of Ephesus. This is the one confusion of
identities in the play that is not comic. Instead of
being made the butt of the comedy the old man is made a
pathetic figure. The pathos is produced by Aegeon's
acceptance of his son’s denial as an understandable
result of the changes that care and time have wrought in
his visage. Since he does not protest, there is no comic
54
conflict. The tension and tone are no longer comic and
the playwright relieves it immediately. At this brush
with pathos, the abbess appears with Antiphlous of Syra
cuse and Dromio and all is instantly clear. With the
resolution of the internal action with its series of
mistaken identities, the enveloping action is also
resolved. Aegeon is reunited with Aemilia, who had become
an abbess after the loss of her set of twins to kidnappers.
The death sentence, the long separation, the estrangement
between husband and wife, the misappropriated chain, the
courtesan’s ring, the rope, the ducats are all forgotten
in the general merriment and felicitations following upon
the mutual recognitions and ducal amnesty.
With this happy, sentimental outcome we can see that
the playwright has turned the material of Plautine farce
to a new use. In Plautus the cognitio had no significance
beyond offering a resolution to the comic entanglement.
In Shakespeare the cognitio, set as it is against a
pathetic-romantic background, serves not only to bring
clarity into the comic confusion but also to bring hap
piness into the somber situation. A whole series of
reversals of intention on the comic level is contained
within the framework of one serious reversal of fortune--
the change from a death penalty to a last minute reprieve
and happy family reunion. We can see that the playwright
has added the tone of pathos to the ludicrous one of
55
farce. It is an elementary harmony that he achieves here
but this tentative mixture of antithetical tones repre
sents a successful experiment. Comic and pathetic tones
can be combined in one play to the enhancement of both.
Shakespeare has learned that he does not have to be con
tent with a pure specimen of either the comic or the
serious.
The Roman farce did not contain the serious, let
alone the pathetic. All pathetic possibilities had been
eliminated by relegating them to the prologue or by sub
merging them in stereotyped characters. Besides using a
serious reversal of fortune in the enveloping action to
introduce the element of the pathetic, Shakespeare also
brings in the element of the strange and marvelous adven
ture beset with perils which is the essence of romance and
contrasts sharply with the mundane realism of farce.
The attempt to correlate the comic reversals with
character is a further step away from Plautine farce in
which the reversals are almost exclusively the result of
coincidence. Shakespeare attempts to differentiate the
characters of the two masters, the two slavej., .the women,
and even of some of the lesser characters so that the
reversals will seem to emanate from character instead of
from mere coincidence. Antipholus of Ephesus is depicted
as being hot-tempered and sulky so that his precipitous
decision to dine with the courtesan will seem plausible.
55
Antipholus of Syracuse is shown as being good-humored,
impressionable, and sentimental so that his initial
acceptance of the confusion is made likely and so that
his courtship of Luciana is made acceptable to her and
to the audience. The pranking nature and cleverness of
Dromio of Syracuse are used as a motive force in the plot
as is the obtuseness and clownishness of the Ephesian slave.
The most significant attempt to relate the reversals
with character is made in the depiction of Adriana. From
the totally unattractive Mulier of Plautus she is changed
into a jealous, possessive woman genuinely in love with
her husband, capable of reformation, and worthy of recon
ciliation. Luciana's reversal of fortune, i.e., from
virginity to marriage is brought about by femininity,
honesty, and loyalty. She confides all to her sister,
and this frankness ironically leads to a happy resolution
in which she finds a husband.
In this early effort Shakespeare is primarily con
cerned with the mechanics of plot, especially with the
manipulation and multiplication of ironic reversals. As
his main agencies of plot movement, he uses a motivating
circumstance outside the main action--the shipwreck--and
multiple accident and coincidence within the main plot,
centering about two sets of identical twins whose desti
nies are intertwined. The central farcical tone is con
trasted with a tone of pathos by wrapping the main
57
incidents in an enveloping action involving the impending
execution of Aegeon, the destitute old father of the twins
in search for his long-lost wife and sons. This pathetic
counter-tone lends significance to the denouement beyond
that of simple comic anagnorisis. In this attempt to
master the structuring and climactic arrangement of ironic
reversals and to balance contrasting tones, beauty of
language is neglected except for a few felicitous touches.
Although characterization is elementary, he does experi
ment with the creation of the romantic heroine. His
success here is very limited, but the attempt indicates
that he is experimenting with character as a force to
initiate and sustain the desired comic or serious action.
CHAPTER II: LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
From a comedy of situation operating on the level of
farce with laughter resulting from ironic reversals brought
about by coincidence and improbability, we turn to a comedy
of artificial conventions with laughter resulting from the
conflict between affectation and natural humor. The
affectations treated include pseudo-celibacy, gongorism,
and pedantry, their natural antagonists being love between
the sexes, the poetic and witty use of language, and
rustic common sense. The structure of the play centers
about the creation of characters which embody these affec
tations and their opposites and the arrangement of inci
dents which bring them into conflict and lead to a
resolution in which nature triumphs over affectation.
As in The Comedy of Errors the playwright uses a
serious enveloping action which contrasts with the tone
of the main action and brings about the resolution of
the central conflict— that between celibacy and love.
Unlike that play, however, this comedy uses a separately
developed C plot involving a conflict between the affec
tation of gongorism and its antithesis, true wit. This
C plot takes the form of a love triangle exposing the
hypocrisy of the gongorist and parodying the love story
58
59
in the main action or B plot.
With the emphasis on affectation and its display,
the dramatist’s attention is centered on language and
atmosphere. The arrangement and complication of incident
is placed second to wit and poetry, one retarding the
action, the other contributing little to its forward
movement.
In attempting a structural analysis of Shakespeare's
early comedies one is forced to consider the question of
relative, if not exact, dates of composition because of
the light such knowledge may shed on the playwright’s
progress from apprenticeship to mastery in his craft.
Unfortunately scholarship has not unequivocally established
precise dates of composition or even the exact sequence
of plays in Shakespeare’s early years as a dramatist.
One is forced to conjecture on the basis of limited
external and treacherous internal evidence. Eminent
scholars will differ widely on the dating of any parti
cular play. At times they may be as many as six years
apart in their dates, and their arrangements of the plays
chronologically may be at distressingly wide variance
with one another.
The problem of dating Love’s Labour’s Lost is just
such a case. There are certain facts which are undis
puted, yet there is far from any unanimity in assigning
the play to any particular year. Estimates range from
60
the somewhat astounding one of 1578, which denies author
ship to Shakespeare in favor of de Vere, to the more
orthodox conjecture of 1595.^ There are others, however,
who argue that it should be dated somewhere between
August of 1588 and August of 1589.3 If the last estimate
is the correct one, it would mean that Love * s Labour * s
Lost is the earliest of Shakespeare's extant comedies.
One of the undisputed facts concerning the dating is
that a quarto edition of the play was published in 1598
with the title page carrying the following announcement:
"A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called, Loues Labors lost.
As it was presented before her Highness this last Christ
mas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.
Imprinted at London W. W. for Cutbert Burby. 1598."
This edition may have been set into type from the original
manuscript, a manuscript which was apparently confusing,
at least to a novice printer, who produced a badly botched
printed copy.^ This printed copy shows definite evidence
that in several places, particularly in Acts IV and V,
^Eva Turner Clark, The Satirical Comedy MLove*s
Labor's Lost" (New York, 19.33), p. 10.
2
Edmund K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (London,
1924), I, p. 333.
^T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere*s Five-Act Struc
ture (Urbana, 1947), p. 579.
^Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson,
Love's Labour's Lost (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 97-130.
61
key speeches have been re-written and augmented.
A copy of this Quarto containing some revisions was
no doubt the basis of the text of the play as it appears
in the First Folio.^ The words "newly corrected and aug
mented" appearing on the title page of the Quarto suggest
that an earlier edition of the play might have appeared
in print unauthorized by the playwright or his company.
A. W. Pollard believes that this Quarto was very likely
preceded by such a pirated earlier edition, of which no
trace remains except in the elusive phrase "newly cor
rected and augmented." Since no copy of such a hypotheti
cal earlier edition, pirated or authorized, has survived,
we can only reason by analogy with the printing history
of Romeo and Juliet that such an earlier printing did
exist. A first quarto of the latter play exists which
is considerably different from the second, inferior to
i t , and probably p i r a t e d . ^
The only importance of these editions, actual and
supposed, is the degree of "correction" and "augmentation"
they represent. Did the playwright take an older play
just prior to Christmas 1597-98 and revise it extensively,
^William A. Neilson and Charles J. Hill, The Complete
Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.,
i w i y , p. 5*.------- —
6A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare*s Fight with the Pirates
(Cambridge, 1920), p. 103.
62
with considerable structural re-working, or did he merely
polish and expand a speech here and there to make a point
more clearly? The results of the structural analysis
attempted here would support the view that the revisions
were relatively minor and that the play remains substan
tially what it was when it was first written. If Shakes
peare had been making extensive structural revisions in a
comedy as late as 1598, one would expect that he would
exploit what he had learned about the construction of a
multi-level, tonally contrasting plot to its maximum use.
It is true he uses a tonally contrasting C plot, but it
is not fully developed. Furthermore, he is awkward in
his use of Holofernes and Nathaniel, who appear to belong
to the C plot and yet are really not a part of it. By
1598, if he were revising a play extensively, he very
likely would have constructed a D plot that had an intri
cately worked out relationship with both the C and the B
plots. Here he uses the potential elements of a D plot
in the persons of Holofernes and Nathaniel in the peri
phery of the C plot and in a masque sequence loosely
related to the B plot. Such an imperfect use of the
elements of the A-B-G-D plot structure would perhaps
suggest that at the time of writing this play Shakespeare
had not arrived at the formula he perfected in A Midsummer
Nightfs Dream.
Quiller-Couch and Wilson argue for a special private
63
performance as the occasion for the initial presentation
of the play,
We give it as our belief and no more, that Love’ a
Labour’s Lost was written in 1593 for a private per
formance in the house of some grandee who had opposed
Raleigh and Raleigh’s "men"--possibly the Earl of
Southampton1s.?
In this same year Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had been
dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton. The young
nobleman had refused to marry despite the urging of his
guardian, Lord Burleigh, and it is therefore not improbable
that love, or rather a disdain for love, was the theme
which occupied the witty young men of Southampton's house
hold. The theme of young men who despised love was thus
ready at hand for the playwright to fashion a lightly
satirical bit of entertainment.®
The only trouble with this conjecture is that it
would seem to place Shakespeare on the wrong side of the
controversy. The theme of the play is clearly intended
to reprimand gently such young men as Southampton for
following false lights. If this were written to entertain
the Earl of Southampton and his friends, it would be
rather risky entertainment to provide one's patron with.
It would seem more likely that the play was designed to
appeal to a feminine audience, or one dominated by a
^Quiller-Couch and Wilson, p. xii.
8Ibid.
64
strong feminine bias, by elevating women to a position
of pre-eminence over any weightier activities a courtier
might engage in, such as difficult abstract studies like
science and mathematics. Rather than assigning the ini
tial performance to the Earl's hall, one might more
reasonably assign it to the court with the Queen being
entertained by the flattering notion that a courtier's
duty is to spend his time in the study of ways to please
a clever and demanding woman.
Although the problems of dating and the nature of the
audience for which the play was written may provide some
information on Shakespeare's development as a dramatist
and on the tone of this particular play, the problem of
interpreting obscure^topical allusions and identifying
supposed prototypes for the various characters will be
ignored here as being irrelevant to matters of structure.
The meaning of "the school of night" and "the charge
school" on the hill will be left for others to fathom.9
Just as the problems of dating, first performance,
and topicality are frustratingly elusive, so is the
tracking down of sources and analogues relatively unre
warding. All that one learns of value here is that there
is a pseudo-historical background for the play and that
9
Frances A. Yates, A Study of "Love's Labour's
Lost" (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 20-26.
65
the names of the chief characters have been borrowed
from contemporary French history. The central idea that
a prince with scholarly pretensions binds himself and his
close associates to an artificial monastic way of life
which is shattered by the intrusion of women would seem
too commonplace to have been the original invention of
Shakespeare; yet no earlier work, either of fiction or of
history, has been discovered which can reasonably be
regarded as a source for the play.^-®
Apparently, then, Shakespeare was here trying to
invent a plot of his own; in The Comedy of Errors he had
relied on the structure of Plautine comedy, a very sub
stantial prop for a novice playwright. All he had to
do there was to revamp an already well constructed play.
He did this primarily by converting the expository
material into a tonally contrasting enveloping action or
A plot and by increasing the possibilities of mistaken
identities through the creation of a second set of twins.
Otherwise, aside from abortive attempts at characteriza
tion, he follows the Plautine pattern of arranging meetings
under real identities, then under false identities, and
back again under real identities. In Love *s Labour * s Lost
he has much more to do: he has to construct his own
•^Love’s Labour^ Lost, ed. Wilbur Cross and Tucker
Brooke (New Haven, 1925), p. 127.
66
original situation, his own complications leading to a
climax, and his own resolution. That he does not succeed
as well here in his B plot is not surprising considering
his relative inexperience and the lack of an exact model
to follow. Given a theme, a cast of pseudo-historical
personages, and a basic blocking situation he tries to
construct a series of incidents depending for their comic
effect not on confusions of identity but on conflicts
between affectation and nature in high and low society.
It is the development of the lesser elements of the con
flict on the level of low society that offers a feature
that had not existed in the Plautine structure and which
overshadows his relative failure in the main plot.
Like the main action of the play, these lesser ele
ments appear also to owe little to Shakespeare’s reading.
They may have been suggested to him by other theatrical
performances which he saw. Several characters in the play
are closely akin to conventionalized types in the Italian
Commedia dell’Arte: Armado is clearly the grandiloquent
braggart who owes his ultimate origin to the miles
gloriosus of classical comedy; Moth is the zany who is
always paired with the braggart in Italian improvised
comedy; Holofernes is the pedant; Nathaniel, the parasite;
Costard, the slow-witted rustic, here transformed; and
Dull, the stupid magistrate. Some of these characters
are identified by the conventional names in parts of the
67
text. H
Whatever the degree of debt to Italian improvised
comedy in the way of adaptation of stock comic figures,
there is no doubt of Shakespeare’s debt to John Lyly.
Heavy as it is, this indebtedness is not that of a slavish
imitator but of one who is striving after a new form of
comedy with the artifice of Lyly as the starting point.
There is a decided structural resemblance between Love * s
Labour’s Lost and two of Lyly's plays, Endimion and Galla-
thea.
The chief points of connexion between Endimion and
Love’s Labour’s Lost would be the four couples in
each, and on the comic side the magnificent Armado
chaffed by his page Moth and declining on Jaquenetta,
as Sir Thopas is chaffed by Epiton and subsides on
Bagoa.12
This resemblance of the fantastical Spaniard and his page
to Lyly's knight and page is so close that one can scarcely
doubt that Shakespeare is here borrowing from his highly
successful predecessor in English comedy. Only Holofernes
and his crew are extraneous to the structure of Endimion
and they may not have been in the original play but may
have been added later as part of the ’ ’ newly corrected and
augmented” material promised in the Quarto edition of 1598.
Shakespeare's debt to Lyly does not stop with the
^Neilson, p. 54.
■^R. W. Bond, The Complete Works of John Lyl^
(Oxford, 1902), II, p. 276.
68
borrowing of symmetrical character groupings and chief
supporting characters. It is further evidenced in a
crucial mechanical detail that propels the action forward
toward the comic catastrophe. This time the borrowing is
not from Endimion but from Gallathea.
The scene in Gallathea (ii.i.) where Diana's nymphs,
entering one by one, confess their broken vow and agree
to pursue their passion, has often been quoted as the
original of that between the four anchorites, which
is dramatically the best in Love's Labour's Lost.^3
This scene is the core of the action of the play. It
represents the climax of the action and furnishes the
motive force for the third and fourth acts.
The evidence above, then, would suggest that not only
the symmetrical characters but also the general structure
of Love's Labour * s Lo s t can be traced to Lyly. This
structural borrowing extends down into the subplot parody
on the main romantic plot, but with a definite breaking
away from its restrictions. As Lyly had used Sir Thopas
and Epiton's wit combats as a parody of the main plot,
so does Shakespeare use Armado and Moth for the same pur
pose. The difference arises, however, in the creation
of Costard by the younger dramatist to act as a rival
to Armado, thereby creating a full parody of the romantic
main plot in the Spaniard's pompous courtship of the
wench Jaquenetta. The apprentice dramatist has improved
13Bond, II, p. 297.
69
on the use of the parodying subplot, but he has learned
the principle of it from his older contemporary.
In addition to the structural details and character
groupings Shakespeare may also have borrowed and adapted
Lyly’s theme. In Endimion the theme centers about the
conflict between love and friendship; in Love * s Labour * s
Lost it centers about the polar natures of love and
learning. Although the themes are not identical, they are
obviously related in their polarization of a modus vivendi.
So also is the delicate fashioning of Lylean diction
easily traceable in the language of Love * s Labour * s Los t.
A king and three lords engage in wit combats with a
Princess and three ladies with a brilliant display of
verbal subtleties cleverly bandied about from one pair
of lovers to another. In the climactic discovery scene
there is a progression of poetry and wit from one young
lord to the next and then back again. In the Russian
masque scene each young man in turn and his feminine
adversary entertain the audience with their verbal bouts.
There is an artificial brilliance about the whole thing.
The young dramatist seems engaged in a verbal juggling
act that he is not quite satisfied with as evidenced by
his importation of Holofemes and Nathaniel with a con
sequent unbalancing of the fragile Lylean structure. He
seems to be aware that all this delicate symmetry and
balance are dominating the structure of the play rather
70
than contributing to it, and he appears to be searching
for a way out of the restrictive formula.
In later plays this search for a way out leads
Shakespeare quite a distance from the artifice of Lyly,
but in this play at least he does owe a clear debt to
this fashioner of stylized comedy. In light of this
clear debt to Lyly it would seem that any pursuit of a
source related to the historical content of the play would
be pointless. Rather than attempting a political or
historical play, Shakespeare was probably simply taking
advantage of a current interest in France and French
personages of importance to fashion a court play after
the model of the master of court plays, John Lyly.
"Navarre," "Berowne," "Dumain," "Longaville," "Boyet,"
etc. are names that the playwright chose to give his
characters in order to lend an elegant tone to his
dramatically stylized treatment of the love-versus-
learning theme, a theme which was part of the intellectual
climate of his day, at least among the leisured nobility
for whom this play seems clearly intended.
The elegant stylization of the play can easily be
seen in a cursory examination of the plot. As a protest
against the usual preoccupation of courtiers, the King
of Navarre resolves to make his court "a little Academe"
with the aid of his three noble friends, Berowne, Longa
ville, and Dumain. Berowne argues against the practicality
71
of the plan and predicts that they will all be forsworn
many times over before the stipulated three-year period
is out, but his objections fall on deaf ears. Reluctantly,
he agrees to bind himself with the others to fasting,
sleeping only three hours a night, and completely eschewing
the company of women. The only diversion they will
permit themselves from their arduous philosophical pur
suits will be the conversation of Don Armado, "one who
the music of his own vain tongue doth ravish like enchan
ting harmony.” No sooner is their compact subscribed
to, however, before it is threatened by a breach from
without. In his scholarly enthusiasm, the King has for
gotten completely about the diplomatic mission of the
Princess of France to his court for the purpose of settling
an old debt existing between him and her father, the King
of France. To complicate matters the Princess is accom
panied on her mission by three charming and vivacious
ladies. Despite his solemn vow, the King is constrained
to unbend and extend them some measure of hospitality.
Before the arrival of this entourage, the first
transgression of the compact is reported by Constable
Dull in the form of a letter from Don Armado, who has
apprehended Costard, a rustic, with Jaquenetta, a country
wench, with whom Don Armado himself is so smitten that
he has fallen into a profound melancholy in which his
thoughts are all directed toward sonneteering his loved
72
one. As punishment for his flagrant transgression,
Costard is placed in Armado's custody for a week of
fasting on bran and water.
Since the impractical compact which he has devised
renders it impossible for him to extend the full hospi
tality of his court to his diplomatic visitors, King
Ferdinand has to resort to a compromise whereby he
attempts to make the ladies as comfortable as possible
in a pavilion in the park outside his palace. During
the ensuing conduct of the diplomatic mission the King
falls in love with the Princess, and each of the three
lords falls in love with one of the ladies.
At the same time the enraptured Armado, in order to
convey the depths of his grand passion, releases Costard
from imprisonment to serve as his letter carrier to
Jaquenetta. On his way to deliver the letter, Costard
is met by Berowne, who also entrusts him with a love-
letter, this one addressed to Rosaline, the dark beauty
among the companions of the Princess.
The letters get mixed in transit: Costard delivers
Armado's wordy rhetoric to Rosaline, who, along with
the other ladies, is much amused by it. Berowne's poetic
avowal of love is delivered to Jaquenetta. Unable to
read, she gives the letter to Holofernes, the village
schoolmaster, so that he may inform her of its contents.
He realizes that the verses are the work of one of the
73
alleged votaries to learning, and he sends them to the
King by way of Jaquenetta and Costard.
Berowne, meanwhile, bemoaning his lover’s state,
conceals himself when he sees the King approaching and
overhears him reciting a poem in praise of his mistress,
the Princess. At the approach of Longaville, the King
hides and both he and Berowne eavesdrop on this lord’s
love-struck poetizing of Maria. The process is repeated
with the arrival of Domain with his sonnet in praise of
Katherine. Longaville reveals his presence to reprove
Dumaine, the King reproves Longaville, and Berowne appears
to chide all three derelict companions for their for
swearing themselves. At this moment Costard and Jaquenetta
appear with written proof of Berowne's similar derelic
tion. Realizing that their compact was a foolish one,
they all agree that women are the books, the arts, the
academes that nourish all the world. To woo and win their
ladies they plan revels, masques, and dances, but they
suffer some misgivings that they may be punished for being
forsworn.
After having dispatched presents to their mistresses,
the lords disguise themselves as Muscovites in preparation
for their visit to the pavilion of the Princess and her
fair companions. The clever young ladies are informed of
their coming by Boyet, the Princess’ advisor, and they
exchange favors so that each of the young men will be
74
wooing the wrong lady. This ruse confounds the lovers
and their Muscovite masquerade ends in fiasco. They
return to their ladies in their own guise and are com
pelled to listen to the ladies’ disdainful tale of the
ridiculous ’ ’ mess of Russians” who visited them. The men
are forced to confess their subterfuge and acknowledge
the cleverness of the ladies.
In the meantime, the village schoolmaster and the
curate, along with Armado, Moth, and Costard, have also
prepared an entertainment. Their presentation of a
pageant of the Nine Worthies before the sophisticated
ladies and lords is productive of much unconscious humor.
Into the midst of this scene of merriment a messen
ger arrives with the news that the King of France is dead.
The Princess is thus compelled by duty to return home
without delay. Ferdinand proposes openly for the hands
of the ladies for himself and his courtiers, but in
punishment for their foolish oath and for forswearing
themselves, the ladies assign them penances adapted to
their personal shortcomings and postpone their answers for
a year and a day.
A backward glance at the plot shows the appropriate
ness of Northrup Frye's observation that ”the movement of
comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to
another.”14 The play opens with the obstructing or
166.
75
humorous characters in control of events, in this case
the King of Navarre and his pseudo-anchorites. The
audience is soon made aware that they are usurpers, i.e.,
antagonists of "common sense." Toward the end of the
play the resolution is brought about by a comic discovery
which destroys the integrity of the usurping society and
permits its antithesis, the rightful society, to be
established with the concurrence and delight of the
audience.
This movement of comedy from one society to another
has been compared to that in a lawsuit in which the
contending parties hold different versions of the same
situation. The plaintiffs in the suit, here the Princess
and her entourage, prove that their version of the facts
is the real one and that the view held by the defendant
King and his lords is an illusory one that deserves to
be abandoned. The Tractatus Coislinianus, a short work
closely related to Aristotle’s Poetics, divides the
dianoia of comedy into two parts: ’ ’ opinion,” representing
the false society; and ’ ’ proof,” representing the true or
desirable society. These proofs take the form of oaths,
compacts, witnesses, ordeals, and laws.
In Love's Labour’s Lost the celibacy and study
compact and the oaths taken upon—i t r form the basis of the
false or unrealistic society. The arrival of the diplo
matic mission staffed by beautiful young ladies constitutes
76
the trial by ordeal which establishes the essential
’ ’ illegality" of any compact which attempts to create a
society excluding women and love. The King has misused
his rights by attempting to create such an unrealistic,
humorous society, and the pseudo-utopia he has whimsically
hoped to create is destroyed by its first encounter with
reality or truth. This society of ritual bondage is akin
symbolically to death and has to be routed by the forces
of youth and life. The triumphant society represents
the forces of life untrammeled by restrictive oaths at
variance with "nature" and "commonsense."
With the opening speech of King Ferdinand we are
acquainted with the artificial restrictions which he is
attempting to impose on the forces of life.
Therefore, brave conquerors--for so you are
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires—
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force.
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me
My fellow scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here.
Your oaths are passed, and now subscribe your
names,
That his own hand may strike his honor down
That violates the smallest branch herein.
If you are armed to do as sworn to do,
Subscribe to your deep oaths, and keep it too.
(I.i.11-23)
The audience is made aware from the start that this
attempt to create an artificial society is doomed to
77
failure, that this war against the "affections'’ and "huge
army of the world’s desires" will end in comic disaster.
The oath sworn to is the constitution of the new society,
but it is a society at war with itself because it depends
on the human affections, bravery and honor, to war against
other human affections, love and desire, in defense of an
absurd compact. The subscribers to this oath are doomed
to disaster, but since this is a comedy, the disaster will
take the form of their conversion to "normality" and
participation in the "natural" society defended by the
proponents of human emotion, the Princess and her escadron
volante. These comic "usurpers" will not be destroyed
as punishment for their deviation from the normal.
Instead they will be punished by ridicule, but they will
be allowed, after suitable penance, to return to the
society of those representing normalcy.
What determines the comic in drama is the standard
of "common sense" against which the alleged deviation is
juxtaposed. The nature of the audience’s customs and
beliefs determines what the norm is that the play will
hold up as the desirable society which the comic or
humorous figures are attempting to depose. In this
instance, the undesirable society is depicted as one in
which celibacy, study, and fasting reign— a pseudo
monastic existence. The desirable society, by converse,
is depicted as one in which love, wit, and festivity
78
reign. Berowne serving as the eiron, or ironic critic,
attacks the tenets of the King as alazon, or proponent
of the comic order,
Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain—
As painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile;
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed,
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And give him light that it was blinded by.
(I.i.72-83)
Here the desirable society is depicted as one in which the
beauty and intelligence of women as mirrored in their eyes
is the proper study and occupation for mankind. This
would suggest that the play was written with the purpose
of vindicating women and love from the attacks of a group
of detractors who would relegate them to a position of
inferiority or eliminate them entirely from the life of
the young noble. It is worthwhile remembering here that
our first extant edition of the play, the Quarto of 1598,
mentions that the play had been performed before the Queen.
This is exactly the type of entertainment that would be
calculated to please a demanding queen anxious to keep
her brilliant young courtiers from becoming too seriously
devoted to anything but her and her court activities.
The nature of the King’s edict would support the theory
(p. 6) that the original audience for which the play was
79
written was very likely not that of the ordinary public
theatres but of some select private hall. The central
theme supposes a set of biases which are distinctly those
of the court and the nobility, especially of the feminine
portion, and has little in it to suit the bias of the
average Londoner. The general theme— nature versus
affectation— would appeal to a miscellaneous audience,
but the working out of the theme in the play is too
specifically courtly to permit the general theme, nature-
versus-affectation, to override the specific one, the
proper study of young men is the beauty and spirit of
young ladies not the knotty, abstruse problems of philo
sophy. Some of the shortcomings of the play as a comedy
arise from the narrowness of the central theme; it was
designed to appeal to too select an audience. Great
comedy appeals to the generality of men in any society;
a lesser form of comedy is satisfied to appeal to the
biases of a select group. Within the limits of what he
was attempting to do here, however, the playwright’s
efforts can be considered as being reasonably successful.
His select audience is provided with a series of related
situations in which the proponents of its cherished
beliefs triumph over those who would destroy its system
of values by establishing a society based on antithetical
principles. This triumph of courtly dalliance over study
was no doubt highly gratifying to his select audience,
80
but since not enough of us share its biases, the play
has a limited appeal in its central comic reversal and
comes to life only in its subsidiary characters and scenes
or in its poetry and spectacle rather than in its basic
conflict.
On the larger scale, the playwright is attempting
to use humor as the vindicator of the natural as opposed
to the affected. This is a situational device that could
easily be productive of genuine humor, but the execution
here fails somewhat short of the conception. The lack
of genuine humor, humor being defined as the product of
a marked disparity between what is and what should be,
arises from the playwright's selecting as his norm or
natural something equally as close to affectation as is
the supposed deviation. Humor is supposed to arise from
the head-on conflict between affectation and what purports
to be nature. It can be stated almost axiomatically that
where the concept of nature is a narrow one, one confined
to the tastes and prejudices of a highly specialized
audience, in this case an Elizabethan courtly one, the
humor runs the serious risk of lacking broad appeal and
deteriorating into conventional highly stylized games
catering to the whims of a group unrepresentative of the
sense of comic disparity of most of us. This is precisely
what happened to Lylean comedy with its symmetrically
paired lovers and their courtly word-play. It needed
81
the silken, atmosphere of court and could not survive in
the russet environment of the public playhouse, the true
arbiter of the universally comic. In this play it is only
where the humor breaks the confines of the courtly via the
presence of Costard, Dull, Holofernes, and Nathaniel that
it gains universality and provokes real mirth rather than
a sophisticated, knowing smile at a wit-bout well played.
When the gap between the affectation and normalcy is
great, laughter results; when the standard of normalcy is
as much at variance with ordinary "commonsense," no
real laughter results except, perhaps, in a way unintended
by the playwright.
Considerable pleasure, it is true, may be derived
from other aspects of the play-~from the poetry, music,
or spectacle, but the central situation in itself and
in the manner it is worked out is not a sufficiently
comic one. Too often the play relies on diction and
spectacle for its appeal instead of on the basic dramatic
elements of character and action.
The comic action in the play centers about the
exposure of the unnaturalness of the social regimen which
the King and his companions have naively and rashly pledged
themselves to.
That is, to live and study here three years.
But there are other strict observances—
As not to see a woman in that term,
And one day in a week to touch no food,
82
And but one meal on every day beside,
And then to sleep but three hours in the night,
And not be seen to wink of all the day—
(I.i.35-43).
The King and his fellow celibates are made young, two of
them even callow, to render the basic incongruity most
striking. Old men might be expected to resist, and per
haps successfully, the pleasures and demands of the
flesh, but young men, never. The notion of study in
itself is not reprehensible or unnatural, but it is con
taminated and condemned by the unnaturally austere company
it is forced to keep. The same pact enjoining them to
study also demands that they resist the normal require
ments of human life: food and sleep. Not only will
they fast one day a week, which is a rigorous enough
prescription in itself, but they must so punish their
weary bodies so as not even to permit their tired lids
to droop in a momentary wink. Such demands for perfection
far beyond the scope of youth and nature are ridiculous
on the face of them and are doomed to failure no matter
how vigorous the protestations in their behalf.
Any society built on such absurd protocols cannot
survive, and Berowne is given the role of eiron to attack
the practicability of the prescribed rituals. Since the
new society is one at variance with common sense and
nature, the eiron serves as a vocal medium for the
inarticulate protests of the audience. The eiron is
83
stilled in his protests by the rigid insistence of the
alazon and his supporters, but we know that his view,
which is that of the audience, will prevail in the end
and the usurpers will be routed. His cry of protest:
Oh, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep;
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep!
expresses exactly the sentiments of the audience, and the
ensuing action of the play will be concerned with vindica
ting this protest.
The playwright has structured his situation so that
a major reversal of intention is imminent in it. In their
attempt to escape women and the other appeals to the
senses, the votaries create a situation in which they will
be rendered most vulnerable. Their absurd oath, blatantly
proclaimed, will serve as a challenge for those opposed
to its terms, and the extreme restrictions they place on
themselves and others will only operate to enhance the
irresistibility of the temptations they have vowed to
avoid.
The audience is not left to conjecture how this
downfall will occur. It is immediately supplied with an
object lesson of the power of nature to destroy artificial
restraint. With the entrance of Dull and Costard we have
the natural world impinging on the artificial. A rever
sal of roles is created in the incorporating of the
homme moyen sensuel into the society of those governed
84
by the restrictive covenants. He is charged, tried, and
found guilty by laws that he had no part in making and no
desire to subscribe to. He represents the norm on a
lower social scale, in fact, on an almost animalistic
one. This is the unsophisticated, natural man ruled by
his desires and appetities, comically bewildered at the
thought that such innocent activity warrants condemnation
and punishment. There is a complete absence of hypocrisy;
in his innocence Costard sees nothing to be denied or
repudiated. It is inconceivable to him that anyone would
wish to curb natural desire and prevent its fulfilment.
Fasting is all right so long as one has a full belly.
This artificial life agreed to by compact produces
the ludicrous situation in which a man is punished for
something which he instinctively knows is not wrong. He
has offended against no one, and no one involved in his
act has lodged a charge against him. Where artificiality
engenders an uncomprehending protest of innocence on
Costard’s part, it fosters lip-service and hypocritical
conformity amongst presumed supporters of the celibacy
pact. In Armado, "the refined traveler of Spain," we
have the self-deceived, zealous hypocrite who would
punish in Costard the very thing he himself is guilty of.
Here again the playwright is using the device of reversal
of roles: one of those designated to preserve the
absurd law is the one most consumed with desire to violate
85
it. Since Costard had never agreed to the compact, it
cannot be said that he committed any real violation. His
plight is comical because he is punished, i.e., suffers
a reversal of fortune for something he did not do as
Dromio is punished for disobedience he was not guilty of.
Armado, on the other hand, has subscribed to the edict.
His actions become comical because of the incongruity
between what he ostensibly subscribes to and what he
actually does. He suffers a reversal of intention and of
fortune in that by attempting to enforce the law he leads
himself into the violation of it. The tone here becomes
satirical insofar as the basis of the comic is the recog
nition of hypocrisy.
Structurally a polarization is set up between the
affected Spaniard and the unpretentious rustic. The
former represents false wit and hypocrisy; the latter,
natural wit and unabashed candor. We are warned in
advance about Armado in the conversation between the King
and his associates:
. . . Our Court, you know, is haunted
With a refined traveler of Spain--
A man in all the world's new fashion planted
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony; (I.i.163-168)
Since his affected speech is the most striking feature
about him, we are given a sample of this before we get to
see him in person. When Dull brings in the accused
86
Costard, he has with him a letter from Armado specifying
the charges. The contest between the unaffected wit of
Costard and the false wit of the Spaniard is seen in the
speech of the swain. The letter starts with a florid
salutation, "Great Deputy, the welkin’s vice-regent, and
sole dominator of Navarre, my soul’s earth’s god and
body’s fostering patron." Costard immediately protests,
"Not a word of Costard yet." The letter continues in its
exaggerated Gongoristic vein and, after many circumlocu
tions and extravagances of style, finally states the
charge against Costard, namely, that of consorting with
the obliging Jaquenetta. The simplicity of the alleged
crime is out of all proportion to the ostentatious wording
of the accusation. The humor is compounded by Costard’s
wittily resorting to a parody of the fantastical Spaniard’s
language in his quibble over "wench," "damsel," "virgin,"
"maid," etc. whereby the rustic seeks to evade technical
guilt by resorting to tricks of language: the act was
not reprehensible in itself; it is only some subtlety of
language that now renders it so. Therefore, he, Costard,
will engage in a few subtleties of language of his own
and thereby escape punishment. In this first engagement
in the lists, then, nature triumphs over affectation in
the production of humor, although affectation has won a
temporary victory by subduing and restraining nature
for the occasion.
87
But the audience knows that this rigid state of
affairs cannot long endure and that the ebullient spirits
of nature and the liberating influence of common sense
exemplified on a gross level by Costard will triumph over
the sterile affectation and ritualistic behavior of
Armado. The compact of the King and his courtiers has
to be viewed against this elemental conflict. Clearly
the King and his fellow celibates are on the side of
affectation and folly, and they too will encounter their
Costards and Jaquenettas. Life will break in upon them,
triumphing over sterility and ritual, the perpetual
antagonists of the comic spirit.
Life, for Ferdinand and his fellow academicians,
takes the form of the Princess of France and her ladies-
in-waiting. They are Jaquenettas in silks instead of
kersey, but Jaquenettas they are nonetheless, as their
bawdy word-play with Boyet attests. The news that they
are coming immediately introduces the comic nemesis into
the main action and suggests the necessary comic catas
trophe, or major reversal, that must result. The compact
stipulates behavior so obviously artificial and contrary
to common sense that it must disintegrate in the face
of all the social and natural pressures that will be
brought to bear upon it by the arrival of the French
Princess and her escadron volante.
Instead of continuing with his main action at this
88
point, the playwright pursues his exposure of the impos
ture and hypocrisy of the gongoristic Armado. In the
first scene he had a wit combat by proxy, with the natural
wit of Costard triumphing over the artificial wit of the
Spaniard. Now he wishes to show the conflict between
Armado’s false polished wit and the true sophisticated
wit of the page Moth. The pretentiousness of the mas
ter’s wit is no match for Moth’s vivacious audacity.
Where Costard had confounded Gongorism with literalness
and a reductio-ad-absurdum simplicity, Moth meets Armado’s
pretentious lamentations with a deflating tautology that
lures the susceptible Armado into foolish distinctions
and feeble hair-splitting. Moth succeeds in turning every
remark to his own advantage. He can ridicule his master’s
pretensions and call him a "cipher" to his face, but
Armado is too vain and self-deluded to be aware of the
contempt his pretensions have made him vulnerable to.
When Armado looks for comfort in his love affair, he asks
Moth what great men have been in love.
Moth. Hercules, master.
Arm. Most sweet Hercules! More authority, dear boy,
name more. And, sweet my child, let them be
men of good repute and carriage.
Moth. Samson, master. He was a man of good carriage,
great carriage, for he carried the town gates
on his back like a porter--and he was in love.
Arm. 0 well-knit Samson’ Strong-jointed Samson!
I do excel thee in my rapier as much as thou
didst me in carrying gates. I am in love too.
Who was Samson’s love, my dear Moth?
Moth. A woman, master. (I.ii.68-81)
89
In this combat between false and true wit, part of
the humor arises from the use of the reversal-of-roles
device. Here the master instead of being the dominant
one is the submissive and tractable one, although he
fancies himself in the former role. Instead of being in
control of the situation, he is being manipulated like a
puppet. Because of his self-deception and affectation,
he is oblivious of the true state of affairs and sees
himself as a Hercules or Samson in love, both of whom,
ironically, were made fools of by women.
The same scene also brings him back into conflict
with natural humor when Dull, Costard, and Jaquenetta
enter. Even the simple, uncomplicated wench gets the
best of him in their brief conversation. Her colloquial
speech is misinterpreted by Armado and she mocks him with
the simplest of irony, ’ ’ Lord, how wise you are!"
In the exchange which follows, between Moth and
Costard, we have a reversal of roles again. In his
contest with Armado Moth had been the wit and his master
the gull. We expect the page’s wit and polish to do the
pame for him here, but he is undone by the rustic’s
malapropisms and non sequiturs and the two go off together
with Costard having the last word, "I thank God I have as
little patience as another man, and therefore I can be
quiet."
The stage is left to Armado, and the departure
90
of genuine wit is emphasized by the gongoristic soliloquy
he closes the scene with,
I do affect the very ground, which is base,
where her shoe, which is baser, guided by
her foot, which is the basest, doth tread.
I shall be forsworn, which is a great argu
ment of falsehood, if I love. And how can
that be true love which is falsely attempted?
Love is a familiar, Love is a devil. There is
no evil angel but Love. (I.ii.172-178)
He brings his self-exposure to a climax with a comical,
pseudo-heroic valedictory,
Adieu, valor! Rust rapier! Be still, drum!
For your manager is in love--yea, he loveth.
Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for
I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit;
write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in
folio. (I.ii.186-191)
With such an occasion for sonneteering— an infatuation
for a light wench--Armado exits, an object lesson in the
folly of affectation.
The first act is a well structured one: its two
scenes have been executed adroitly and swiftly. Scene i
has handled the expository material of the B plot, which
involves the romantic conflict between the King and his
fellow celibates and the Princess and her entourage, who
are coming to settle the old debt between France and
Navarre. The blocking force in the central comic action,
Ferdinand and his absurd compact, has been clearly deline
ated and its antagonist, the deprecating force of Berowne
as the eiron, has been established as an ally of the
moving force provided by the Princess and her ladies.
91
Furthermore, the main characters and incidents of the G
plot, the parodying subplot, and their relation to the
main plot have been set up: Costard's dalliance with
Jaquenetta sets up the first complication, and Armado's
infatuation sets up the first intrigue.
Act I has succeeded in setting up the usurping or
artificial society in the "little Academe" of Navarre.
It is now the playwright’s task to show the antithetical
society and to lay the groundwork for the main action of
the play which is to be based on the antagonism between
the usurping and the legitimate society with the ultimate
defeat and deposition of the former.
Act II falls far below the level of Act I structurally.
For one thing, it is too short; for another, it lacks
the balance provided by tonal contrast. It sets up a
feeble internal complication in the B plot in the too
ready capitulation of the blocking force, thus rendering
subsequent action anti-climactic. Furthermore, there is
too much talk and not enough dramatic complexity. The
act contains only one scene, which is completely dominated
by witty exchanges, where it should have had at least two,
perhaps three, scenes to help create complications that
would stimulate interest and suspense on several plot
levels. These weaknesses arise from the playwright's
not yet understanding the principle of coterminous
action, which he does not master until he writes A
92
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Shakespeare uses the Lylean device of symmetrical
character groups to set up the lines of battle. The
Princess is pitted against Navarre; Rosaline against
Berowne; Maria against Longaville; and Katherine against
Dumain. In the initial skirmish, the features of the
young ladies are concealed by masks, placing the young
men at a disadvantage by depriving them of the opportunity
of seeing what each of the young ladies look like. This
ambiguity of identities is a transparent device to permit
the further confusion of identities which occurs later on
in the play as a result of the machinations of the young
ladies abetted by Boyet.
In this first contact between the warring societies,
Boyet serves as the pivotal point about which the sepa
rate frays revolve. His is the spirit of worldly wisdom
that smoothly expedites the inevitable association of
young men with young women. His is a god-like role:
that of an elder Cupid, as it were. He is a plot expedi
ter and he operates through his role as liaison man
between the two hostile camps. He not only serves to
effect the first contact but also later helps to prolong
the action by spying on the young men and informing the
ladies of their plan to disguise themselves as Russians.
He later confounds the performers in the masque and
hastens the capitulation of Berowne.
93
He is also used to bring out one of the secondary
themes in the play, namely, that beauty is purchased
through tribute of the eyes and not by words. When he
praises the Princess’ beauty, she admonishes him that one
falls in love not through the effect of words but through
the physiological mechanism of sight, i.e., through a
natural process not through a studied artifice of language.
This physiological-psychological process is made possible
by bringing the young lords into the presence of the
young ladies so that they can be visually smitten despite
all their resolve to the contrary.
In the conversation that occurs while Boyet is on
his mission to the King, the young ladies engage in
characterizations of the young lords. Longaville is rep
resented by Maria as "a merry mocking” lord whose only
defect is "a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will.”
Dumaine is depicted by Katherine as ”a well-accomplished
youth. . . . For he hath wit to make an ill shape good,/
And shape to win grace though he had no wit." Rosaline
in turn says of Berowne, "but a merrier man,/ Within the
limits of becoming mirth/ I never spent an hour’s talk
withal.” The outcome of the impending conflict is never
seriously in doubt: the impossibility of the vows being
kept is manifest. From these admiring descriptions and
the obvious pairing off of young lady with young man,
it is clear that the frigid restraint imposed by the oath
94
will melt under the heart-warming glances exchanged
between opponents.
Boyet returns from the court of Navarre with a
declaration of open war. The King means to lodge the
ladies in an open field "Like one that comes here to
besiege his court." Ironically, this is exactly the
situation that prevails: the young ladies, representing
the forces of normal society, are at war with the young
lords, the advocates of an "unnatural" society. As
Caroline Spurgeon points out, the dominating symbolical
imagery is that of war and weapons.
The main underlying theme of the confounding and dis
pelling of the fog of false idealism by the light of
the experience of real life is presented through a
series of brilliant encounters, when even the laughter
'stabs', the tongue is keen as 'the razor’s edge
invisible', and lets missiles fly to right and left--
conceits having wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind,
thought, swifter things,
and words being pictured throughout as rapier-like
thrusts, arrows, bullets fired from a cannon or as
combatants tilting with their spears at a tournament.
Longaville's wit is described as a sharp-edged sword
handled by too blunt a will, Moth carries Armado's
messages as a bullet from the gun, Boyet and Biron
tilt straight and merrily at each other, Boyet*s eye
wounding 'like a leaden sword', while the jesting
Biron, at the end, in despairing capitulation, stands
in front of Rosaline and cries,
lady, dart thy skill at me;
Thrust thy sharp wit quite through
my ignorance
95
Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit.15
When the ladies turn their clever wits on one another at
the departure of the young lords, the Princess reminds them
’ ’ This civil war of wits were much better used/ On Navarre
and his bookmen, for here ’ tis abused.”
The first battle of the war ends with the mock capi
tulation of Navarre and his lords. The next task of the
dramatist is to provide the precipitating incidents whereby
the capitulation is genuine, open, and irrevocable.
Act III, like Act II, is poorly executed from a
dramatic standpoint: action is minimal and witty exchanges
dominate the act without doing much to further complicate
either the C plot, with which it is mostly concerned, or
the B plot, which it turns to with the arrival of Berowne.
Because of his insufficient command of the principle of
coterminous action, the playwright has to treat the inci
dents in the different plots sequentially. In exactly
the same number of lines (205) and at the same point in
the play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the more experienced
playwright will effect the characterization of Bottom,
the intrigue of Puck, the flight of the rude mechanicals,
the infatuation of Titania for the ’ ’ translated" Bottom,
and the latter’s delightful interchange with Masters
15
Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cam
bridge , 1935), pp. 271-272.
96
Mustardseed, Cobweb, and Peaseblossom. In this early
effort all he succeeds in doing is to provide topically
allusive wordplay, superfluous from the standpoint of
characterization and obstructive from the standpoint of
plot movement.
In this act, he parodies this war of wits between
the courtly lovers on the gongoristic level of the love-
smitten Armado bewailing his plight to Moth. The verbal
play which was clever and amusing in its own right in the
previous scene becomes amusing here primarily because of
the satirical element in it. This is affectation being
punctured, and the hapless Armado entertains us by virtue
of his lack of wit not by any possession and skilful use
of it. To emphasize his pathetic pretensions he is
always pitted against either the true polished wit of
Moth or the simple rustic wit of Costard. In either
case Armado always comes off a poor second, without ever
being aware that he has been bested, so deep is his
self-delusion and so shallow his perception.
In contrast to the witty exchanges between the
ladies and between them and the young lords, the wit here
is all one-sided. Moth's mental dexterity makes it pos
sible for him to twist the most innocuous of Armado!s
remarks into a barb directed against the hapless
Spaniard's bombast without the other being aware he has
even been pricked. The page calls his master an ass
97
and his lady a wanton and all the pompous master can say
is, "A most acute juvenal, voluble and free of grace!'’
Costard appears on the scene in answer to Armado's
summons, providing another opportunity to display the
supremacy of natural, unpolished wit over affected wit.
Where Armado misuses the language because of his fanciful,
figurative application of it and makes himself ridiculous
in the process, Costard misuses it because of his canny
literal application of it and overwhelms his adversary in
the process. The word "enfranchise” becomes "one Francis,"
the words "immured, restrained, captivated, bound" become
equated with the state of his bowels, and in a crowning
feat of misapplication of language, the words "remunera
tion" and "guerdon" become equated with the tangible
"three farthings" and "shilling." It is an amazing tour
de force: the gongoristic Armado has been defeated at
his own game. Operating on the level of high abstractions
he has been bludgeoned by the literal language of Costard
acting on the level of lowly concreteness. It is a fell
blow that the badly defeated gongorism cannot hope to
survive. It has met a dual defeat. It has been pierced
by the rapier of true wit and clubbed by the homely staff
of natural humor.
Throughout this central portion of the play, which
should contain a series of rapidly occurring incidents
leading to a climax, the playwright relies heavily on
98
language as a structural device to create the atmosphere
of affectation versus nature instead of using action to
create suspense. As a result, he slows down the comic
rhythm and fails to build any suspense, the equilibrium
between expectation and surprise. When Artnado and Moth
engage in their wit bout, we are entertained momentarily
but not further involved in any action which is part of
a motivating complication or intrigue. The combat with
Costard serves a more useful turn structurally in helping
to propel the action forward through the device of the
letter entrusted to the clown, but it is an extremely
mild and suspenseless form of intrigue, one where expec
tation far outweighs surprise. The confessed apostasy of
Berowne in his extravagant, oxymoronic eulogy of Rosaline
is a dramatically inept attempt to complicate the B plot
by a weakly contrived intrigue within its own element.
In the absence of a D plot or a fully developed C plot,
the playwright lacks the means to propel the action for
ward without resorting to static, non-suspenseful
exposition, which is precisely what Berowne1s speech is
regardless of how entertaining it might be rhetorically
as an elegant tonal contrast to the ludicrous gongorism
of Armado. It is not exposition or further verbal pyro
technics the playwright needs here but a cleverly inter
locking multi-level plot structure.
Acts I and II had established the two rival societies
99
and shown them in preliminary conflict. Act III fur
thered the action by showing the imminent capitulation
of one representative of the usurping society. Now the
dramatist has to make this surrender involve the entire
society and prepare for the inevitable comic catastrophe.
To accomplish this the playwright uses the multiple
exposure scene borrowed from Lyly's Gallathea and the
device of the misdelivered letters.
The hunting scene serves to provide an occasion for
the misdelivery of Armado1s letter to Rosaline and also
to give occasion for further witty exchanges between the
young ladies and Boyet. T. W. Baldwin makes much of the
banter between the Princess and the forester concerning
her twisting of his compliment "fair." He assigns a
weighty significance to it in connection with the Pro
testant belief in "salvation by grace" as opposed to
the Catholic one of "salvation by merit." He labors the
point and insists that Shakespeare is labeling as heresy
the doctrine of justification by works, and is applying
that doctrine to beauty and merit. From the general
tone of the play it is highly problematical that the
playwright was concerned with making such a solemn
pronouncement. The remarks can stand on their own merits.
The Princess is simply using her wit to chide the all-
^ Shakespearefs Five-Act Structure, p. 598.
100
too-eager servitor for indulging in the conventional,
meaningless compliments on her beauty, since her wit is
adornment enough to be praised.
When Costard arrives, his literalness of language
meets its match in the Princess’ sophisticated use of the
very device he uses naturally. She turns his ’ ’ greatest
lady” into "The thickest and the tallest." Instead of
the polite deference of the royal forester she is treated
with the refreshingly blunt observation of the rustic
who assigns her a position of preeminence because she is
the "thickest” present.
Costard, obligingly enough for the purposes of the
slender plot, delivers the wrong letter. It is immediately
recognized as one written by Armado to Jaquenetta, and
provides much sport for the courtly critics. The language
of the letter may very well be a parody of the style of
some particular well-known figure of the day, but too
much ink has already been spilled in inconclusive attempts
to find the supposed original for Armado for a solution
to be sought here. One does not need to know the precise
original tc be amused by the sight of affectation of
language being coupled with affectation of feeling. The
letter conveys perfectly the desired sense of pretended
emotion larded over with repetitions, circumlocutions,
empty comparisons, and total irrelevancies.
Again true wit is juxtaposed against the false wit
101
of Armado's love letter in the badinage between Boyet
and Rosaline. She carefully parries every double entendre
of the old courtier but at the same time makes it quite
clear that she is a woman ready to be loved by a man
worthy of her mettle. On her departure Costard joins
in the bawdy interchange and delivers an unconsciously
fitting judgment on it in his,
O’ my troth, most sweet jests, most incony vulgar
wit!
When it comes so smoothly off, so obscenely, as
it were, so fit.
Scene ii of Act IV provides the counterpart of action
in scene i. Here the letter to Rosaline is mistakenly
delivered to Jaquenetta. At this point Holofernes and
Nathaniel are brought into the play, quite extraneously
from a structural standpoint but felicitously from a comic
one. Holofernes serves as an object example of empty and
pretended learning; Nathaniel, as the gullible, sycophan
tic follower of the bogus wise man. They are not essential
to the plot but are maneuvered into it so that the play
wright can furnish instances of deviation from the natural
and the laughable folly it engenders. The pedantry of
Holofernes is accentuated by a double foil: an admiring
follower in Sir Nathaniel and a deflating antagonist in
the rustic Dull whose obtuseness dulls the effect of
Holofernes’ cumbersome learning. Costard is used to
deflate Armado with natural cleverness; Dull is used to
102
deflate Holofernes with natural stupidity. In both
instances there is a triumph of unpremeditated nature over
studied effort, and the humor results from the reversal
of roles. One would expect the conscious, studied opponent
to triumph, but instead it is the unconscious, naive one
that emerges victorious. Here Holofernes uses the language
of ignorance wisely.
Holofernes and his crew are further useful as a
structural device in that they provide the means whereby
the two warring societies in the main plot can reconcile
their differences and be allied in mirth at the expense
of continuing affectation. The pageant of the Nine
Worthies arranged by Holofernes affords the occasion for
the reconciliation in mirth in the last act. The force
of the laughter can now be directed away from the erst
while celibate society to the gongoristic-pedantic-rustic
society of Holofernes, Armado, and Costard.
The weakness in plot construction that started with
Act II continues to the last scene in Act IV. The first
two scenes of this act are simply transparent contrivances
to get the letters misdelivered. The first scene is
dominated by the wit of the Princess and her entourage and
is essentially static; the second, by the verbal battle
involving pedantry (Holofernes), sycophancy (Sir Nathaniel),
and obtuseness (Dull), which has no real connection with
the C plot and yet does not help form an independent D
103
plot. Although the climactic mutual discovery scene is
structurally the best in the play in its use of reversals,
it comes too late and ends, not in action, but in an anti-
climactic, movement-retarding speech which offers only
vague promise of resolving the conflict in the B plot.
At this point one might have legitimately expected a
scene showing a climactic incident in the Armado-Jaque-
netta-Costard love triangle or C plot, but nothing further
is heard of it until Act V, and then it is merely alluded
to as part of the general banter. One is forced to
conclude that either the playwright was not concerned with
constructing a complex but integrated plot or that he had
not yet found the formula which would permit the synchro
nizing of disparate stories into a unified plot structure.
The linear action of the play, slender as it is, is
brought to a climax in Act IV through a reversal-of-roles
device: the apostate votaries to celibacy are now all
doting lovers. They expose their defections to one
another by a bit of stage business Shakespeare probably
borrowed from Lyly’s Gallathea. Berowne is the initial
figure from which the denouement proceeds. Ironically,
he is the first whose defection we become positively
aware of, but he is the last to be exposed. He appears
on the stage arguing with himself in the euphuistic vein
of his soliloquy to "Dan Cupid," and steps aside when he
sees the king entering reading from a paper in his hands.
104
Navarre unburdens himself of amorous poetic sentiments
to his lady-love, the Princess, and steps aside when
Longaville arrives in similar straits. He divulges his
love for Maria in a sugared sonnet, and in turn conceals
himself at the arrival of Dumain. After eavesdropping on
Dumain’s lament, Longaville confronts him with a sancti
monious accusation of perjury. The King upbraids them
both, and Berowne has a short-lived triumph over all
three in a pretended innocence which is stripped away by
the arrival of Costard with the letter Berowne had penned
to Rosaline.
Thus, each in turn has experienced a comic reversal
of fortune. From presumably contented celibacy, each has
been catapulted into the tormented state of the lover.
Each has also experienced a comic reversal of roles: from
being the observer of his comrades' defection, he in turn
becomes the observed, and from being the superior "inno
cent" one, he becomes the culprit. Each also experiences
a reversal, of intention. Each intends to recite his love
poem in secret but succeeds in airing it to those he
would most wish to conceal it from.
With all exposed as forswearers of their common
oath, the task is now to reconcile their defection with
their original promise. Berowne is selected as the
attorney to prove that their loving is lawful and their
fidelity not damaged. His speech at the end of this
105
act is one to gratify the strongest scruple of those
defending the "natural" or temporarily deposed society.
Despite their desire to return to the society of
normal intercourse, the pseudo-celibates are not to be so
easily exonerated of past guilt. They had made a solemn
vow, and they must be punished for being so faithless to
their word, no matter how foolish the vow. They must be
humiliated by the defenders of the true society and be
forced to admit openly they have renounced their guilty
past. They must pay a price in order to gain re-admission
to the "natural" society. That price will be the going
awry of their love’s labors and their consequent morti
fication.
This mortification is left for Act V to accomplish.
Unfortunately, this act is a weak, over-long hodge-podge
instead of a skilful bringing-together of resolved compli
cations. The only action in a quibble-filled first scene
is the last-minute organization of the entertainment to
be presented at court by Armado and his associates. Scene
ii is an extremely long one (941 11.), yet all it accom
plishes is the comically insipid routing of the false
Muscovites and the presentation of the comic masque.
Nothing is resolved by the inevitable operation of inter
nal forces: resolution in the B plot depends on the
abrupt arrival of a force from the A plot, and adequate
resolution of the C plot is neglected entirely. Wordy
106
episode and buffoonish spectacle substitute for carefully
resolved structure.
Judging solely from the structure of the play one
might reasonably assume that this is one of the earliest
of Shakespeare’s comic efforts. It certainly suffers
from a number of structural deficiencies. A thinly con
trived main plot inadequately supported by an incompletely
resolved subplot forms the basis of a relatively uneventful
story. The piece exists more for the sake of displaying
verbal brilliance than for any sustained developing of
comic conflict. The action never moves forward with any
real sense of intriguing complications leading to an
inevitable climax. The various comic reversals— of inten
tion, of fortune, and of roles— are in themselves amusing
occasionally, but they are not yet being used in a
crescendo-like manner to attain the maximum effect. The
catastrophe in the B plot seems lamely arrived at, and
the playwright resorts to a deus ex machina to resolve
his plot rather than by arranging an inevitable concur
rence of events that tie the enveloping action or the
parodying subplot in with the main action.
Perhaps, as Charlton suggests, this should not be
regarded as a real play but more as an exercise in the
play of words. ”It is the work of a poet who was bom
into an age of drama,— but as yet is only vaguely cog
nizant of the demands of drama as distinct from those
107
of poetry."-1 - 7 The young poet trying his hand at stage
craft is too enamoured of the sound of words and delights
too much in his clever manipulating of language until it
bends to his every need except that of plot movement. Every
verbal trap--gongoristic bombast, pedantic nonsense,
bawdy wordplay, and clownish malapropisms--attracts him
at the price of sound dramatic structure. They are often
clever examples of word manipulation, but they are not
used in a sufficiently integrated manner to weave charac
ter and plot together. They too often exist for their
own sake because they are sparkling proof of the young
poet’s verbal dexterity rather than because they perform
a structural function.
But this is not the type of play a practical drama
tist can go on writing indefinitely. Lyly had gained
his reputation as a court playwright with exactly this
type of slender dramatic fare, but it was going out of
popularity by the time Shakespeare wrote this play. It
is not mere verbal brilliance that builds great drama—
comedy or tragedy. Diction is only one of the elements
of drama, and no matter how brilliant it may be, it is
still properly only one of the lesser elements. It must
be subordinated to the interests of character and plot,
or at least not be permitted to override them as so often
17Pp. 100-102.
108
happens in this play. As yet the young playwright has
not disciplined his genius to the difficult task of
underplaying one's chief asset and developing elements
which may have to be learned by hard study rather than
coming easily by nature. Poetry and wit come easily for
this talented writer, but dramatic structure is presently
something he is not quite so adept in. He must subject
himself to further schooling in the architectonics of
comedy even if it means temporarily neglecting his more
natural talents.
The comic elements that are to be found in his mature
works are developed only embryonically in this present
play. The playwright is inexpertly attempting to handle
repeated ironic reversals, but he succeeds only in creating
vignettes not a sustained comic structure. The Costards
and the Dulls have to reach full maturity and develop
their own separate C plot with carefully worked out compli
cations and an inevitable resolution related to one of the
other plots before Shakespeare's efforts will reach the
heights of great comedy. The Berownes and Rosalines will
have to develop real characters of their own rather than
being mere mouthpieces for witticisms before they will
become genuinely humorous and appealing in their own right.
The beginning is here; it is simply a matter of careful
development and further breaking away from the limiting
artifice of Master John Lyly.
CHAPTER III: THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
As with Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Comedy of Errors
the precise date of composition and first performance of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona has not been satisfactorily
established, leaving the structural analyst with no exact
sequence for the early plays to help him in the study of
Shakespeare's development from tyro to master in the diffi
cult art of stagecraft. That this is a novice work, writ
ten early in the dramatist’s career, is beyond cavil; it
has been variously estimated as having been first performed
anywhere between 1591 and 1595. Although it is mentioned
in Meres’ list of 1598, no text of the play exists earlier
than that of the First Folio. This interesting fact prob
ably indicates that the play was never popular enough to be
worthwhile pirating in quarto form or to be worth legiti
mate printing by the playwright's agent in order to combat
pirating or capitalize on any interest the play might have
inherited from frequent performances on the public stage.
Another singular feature about the publication history of
the play is that the Folio edition omits all stage direc
tions and contains few indications for entrances and exits
within the scenes. This almost complete absence of manage
rial directions would lend support to the conjecture that
109
110
the play was a failure on the stage and was not performed
often enough to deserve careful attention being paid to
keeping an accurate acting copy in the company’s files.^
In Love’s Labour's Lost Shakespeare had emphasized
speech at the expense of action. In this play, however,
the action in the B plot is skilfully complicated and
brought to a climax, and language is used functionally to
propel the play forward, not primarily to entertain by its
wit and beauty. Viewed in detail from a structural stand
point, the play still shows weaknesses that suggest that
the playwright had not yet solved certain basic problems
of motivation, multi-level action, atmosphere, and tone.
Even though Love's Labour’s Lost sacrifices dramatic action
to verbal pyrotechnics, its C plot offers a more satisfac
tory parody, and the tone and atmosphere support the slen
der story better than those elements do in this play.
Furthermore, Armado and Costard are better characterized
and more skilfully integrated with the B plot than are the
C plot principals in this presumably later play. If The
Two Gentlemen of Verona actually is a later play, it would
indicate that in Shakespeare's development as a dramatist
growth was not steady but rather uneven, depending on which
element he was giving his attention to.
Despite its own generally acknowledged dramatic
1-Neilson and Hill, p. 25.
Ill
deficiencies and its apparent lack of success in the thea
ter, the play does provide patterns of incidents and
characters which are used later on when the dramatist has
solved the structural problems he is only experimenting
with in his play. The plight of a young maiden who has an
unwanted suitor forced on her by a stern father opposed to
the suitor of her choice is used again in Juliet’s ill-
starred love. The famous balcony scene in the later tragedy
of young love is clearly presaged in the mention of Silvia’ s
tower window, accessible only by a perilous climb. So also
does the playwright use the device of banishment of the
hero again, not only in Romeo, but also in As You Like It.
Julia seeks advice on her suitors from her confidante and
go-between, Lucetta, in a scene pointing to the much more
adroitly handled one in The Merchant of Venice, where Por
tia puts Nerissa to a similar use. Julia, in quest of her
lover, dons the garb of a boy as do her more famous liter
ary sisters, Rosalind and Viola. What this demonstrates is
that the playwright t ^'lt his crowning achievements on the
ground cleared by his earlier efforts.
Very much the same sort of thing can be said of Love’s
Labour’s Lost, in which Costard and the other Worthies
prefigure the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream;
Berowne and Rosaline, the more brilliant Benedick and Bea
trice; and Holofernes and Nathaniel, the comedy pair of Sir
Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
112
All that these self-owed debts prove is that the
artist was to do more successfully later on what he never
quite succeeds in doing well here or in the other two early
comedies: create memorable characters whose relation to
the comic action is a genuinely functional one. Even
though these early efforts are comparative failures, one
can see, blessed by the hindsight conferred by the drama
tist's later works, that he is grappling with the right
problems. The apprentice dramatist as yet lacks the thea
trical skill to fashion a slender plot of his own or a
loosely spun tale and a highly idealized theme into a
skilfully coordinated dramatic structure demonstrating a
firm grasp of the concept of ironic reversals operating
on different levels but producing a single effect.
The loosely spun tale and the highly idealistic theme
Shakespeare employs in this play came to him through Ren
aissance modifications of the medieval romance. The plot
of the play corresponds in its main features with the story
of the formidable huntress Felismena in the Spanish prose
pastoral romance Diana Enamorada by Jorge de Montemayor.
The exact manner in which Shakespeare became familiar with
the story is not known. He may have had access to a
manuscript copy of Bartholomew Yonge's English translation
of the Spanish romance or he may have read a French version
by Nicholas Colin which was available in England about the
time the play was most likely written. It is even possible
113
he may have witnessed a performance of or read an earlier
dramatic version of the story in a lost play, Felix and
Philiomena, reputedly acted before the Queen at Greenwich
in 1584.2
Julia in Shakespeare’s play corresponds to the faith
ful Felismena in the de Montemayor romance. Felix, the
erring lover of Felismena, is the original of Proteus. The
courtship of Felix and Felismena plays a much more exten
sive part in the Spanish tale, but the English dramatist
retains its cardinal features. The scene in which Lucetta
brings Proteus’ letter to her mistress follows closely the
scene in the original. In fact, the playwright employs
most of the scenes and actions appearing in the narrative.
Proteus, like Felix, is sent to court; Julia, like Felis
mena, follows him disguised as a boy. She too overhears
her lover propose to a rival, takes service as a page with
her false lover, is sent as a messenger to the rival lady,
describes the beauty of the jilted lady, etc. The play
wright does make changes in the main story, however, to
suit the purposes of comedy. He splits the character of
Felix in two by the creation of Valentine as a counterpart
to the rival lady so that there will be a brace of lovers,
thereby ensuring a happy ending instead of a mournful one
2Frederick S. Boas, Shakespeare and his Predecessors
(New York, 1905), p. 190.
114
for the rival lady. By this character division he also
provides a basis for the ruptured friendship theme which
is nowhere to be found in the Spanish pastoral. There the
rival lady had fallen in love with the page, as Shakespeare
later has Olivia fall in love with Viola, and died of unre-
quited love. In the play Shakespeare has Silvia, the rival
lady, only deeply pity the rejected lady and form a friend
ship with the tender-hearted page. The means whereby the
dramatist effects a reconciliation between his estranged
lovers bears no relation to the resolution in the Diana.
Rather than inventing these divergencies from de
Montemayor, Shakespeare may have merely borrowed from
another source. Again, as with the stock figures of the
pedant, braggart, and parasite in Love * s Labour1s Los t, he
may have borrowed the characters and the situation of the
false friend from Italian comedy. In Flavio Tradito, a
play in Flaminio Scala’s book of collected scripts pub
lished in 1611, Oratio proves false to his sworn friend
Flavio by making love to Isabella, Flavio's loved one.
Flavio eventually learns of Oratio's perfidy but does not
take action immediately. One day, Flavio, discovering his
friend about to be slain in a duel, magnanimously rushes
to his rescue. At this gesture of sincere friendship,
Oratio, overcome by remorse for his infidelity, surrenders
Isabella to Flavio, and the damaged friendship is restored
115
to its pristine beauty.3 The similarity between this
play and the ending in Shakespeare’s is so marked that one
must accept his debt either to this very play or to the
general tradition of ideal courtly friendship of which it
is a representative. In this highly conventionalized type
of Italian comedy, theme is allowed to dominate over charac
ter and plot to the extent that probability is severely
wrenched, and character never develops beyond the stock
figures of the true-lover-and-friend, the false-lover-
and-friend, and the innocent and true lady-love-in-between
who is merely a pawn in the contest of who is the more
devoted friend. The young English dramatist apparently
permitted himself to be guided by the necessities dictated
by the theme than by those of dramatic characterization and
motivation.
As a part of its idealized, courtly theme, the play
exhibits many of the conventions of fine amor, the love
code of chivalry which prevailed from the twelfth to the
sixteenth century, and the hereos or illness from which
the lover of romance was supposed to suffer.^ Speed, for
example, derides his master for being in love and going
ungartered just as the latter had earlier chided Proteus
3Bullough, p. 81.
^William Meader, Courtship in Shakespeare (New York,
1954), p. 7.
for his love-sickness.
Val. Why, how know you that I am in love?
Speed. Marry, by these special marks: first, you have
learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms like a
malcontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast
to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh,
like a school-boy that had lost his ABC; to weep,
like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast,
like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears
robbing, to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmass.
You were wont when you laugh’d, to crow like a cock;
when you walk’d, to walk like one of the lions; when
you fasted, it was presently after dinner; when you
looked sadly, it was for want of money: and now you are
metamorphos’d with a mistress, that, when I look on you,
I can hardly think you are my master. (II.i.18-32)
Thus Valentine pays for his previous "contemning of Love"
by his suffering when he falls in love with Silvia. He is
punished with "bitter fasts" and loss of sleep, two very
common afflictions of the melancholy lover.
According to the traditions of fine amor the lovers
also make use of go-betweens and confidants. Speed plays
the latter role mockingly in the scene quoted above, and
Proteus employs the disguised Julia as his go-between to
Silvia after he has discharged the clown Launce, who had
earlier served him in that capacity. Lucetta, the servant
to Julia, also serves as her confidante and go-between.
As we have already seen (p. I l l ) , she advises her mistress
as to which of the suitors to favor, and she brings Julia
a letter which Speed has given her from Proteus.
The play also follows the fine amor tradition rela
ting to rings and other gifts. Julia’s gift of a ring to
Proteus is regarded by both as a token of espousal
117
de futuro, and his giving it to Silvia is one of the
serious evidences of his infidelity. Portraits, on the
other hand, are not regarded as seriously in the tradition.
The giving of a picture was much less significant of emo
tional commitment than the giving of a ring. Its conferring
did not necessarily imply love, although the requesting
and accepting of one seemed to have done so. Proteus in
his treacherous pursuit of Silvia asks for her portrait
even though she protests firmly that his suit is unwanted
and hopeless. Even though she is far from encouraging his
courtship, she still agrees to give him her picture
because, according to convention, it is no admission of
anything on her part nor any assumption of obligation that
Proteus might legitimately hold her to later.^
The terms of endearment in the play also accord with
the conventions of the courtly love tradition, which from
the days of the Provengal poets considered the woman as
the superior one in the love relationship. Accordingly,
Valentine addresses Silvia as ' ’ mistress” and she calls him
"servant.”
According to the tradition, unless the union is sanc
tioned by one or both of the parents of the lovers, the
plans have to be made by the lovers themselves. If the
parents are in active opposition, plans for elopement are
^Meader, pp. 138-139.
118
made in deep secrecy, shared only by the confidants, who
usually assist in the preparations and actual flight. In
this play, Valentine confides his plans to his supposedly
loyal friend, Proteus, telling him that he intends to scale
the wall to Silvia’s high window with a rope-ladder that
he will conceal on his person and carry his love off des
pite her father’s opposition and contrary plans.
Added to this theme of fine amor dating back to the
conventions of lady-worship of the high Middle Ages is the
Renaissance one of idealized friendship between two cour
tiers. The Renaissance courtier had an elaborate code of
conduct prescribed for him and a formidable list of vir
tues he had to aspire toward and achieve. From the trans
lators of Castiglione to Spenser, gentleman-writers in
England held before the Elizabethan courtier the high ideals
he owed fealty to. Not only did he read about them and
hear them discoursed upon at length, he also saw them
exemplified in paragons such as Sir Philip Sidney, the
living embodiment of the courtly ideal. The virtues of
the ideal courtier included first of all, as a part of
Justice, the golden attribute of Fidelity or Constancy.
Proteus’ name immediately singles him out as a defector
from the cardinal gentlemanly virtue. When he begs for
forgiveness of his sins from his virtuous friend Valentine,
the latter in granting forgiveness is merely displaying
in its ultimate form the courtly ideal of Magnanimity
119
which, as in Spenser's Prince Arthur, is the stun total
of all courtly virtues. The magnanimous courtier ignored
wrong done to him and forgave his malefactors freely. He
sought always to confer benefits rather than receive them,
as exemplified by Sidney declining the drink of water on
the battlefield in favor of the wounded soldier even
though he himself was mortally stricken.
In order to understand the play one has to be aware
of these two traditions: the medieval one of fine amor
and the Renaissance one of ideal friendship. If the
actions of the play are judged against the standards of
common sense and normal behavior, they become incomprehen
sible and lead to the irrelevant moral strictures passed
on the play by Victorian critics, who saw in Valentine’s
deeding of Silvia to Proteus an example of total moral
depravity. Such critics were simply not aware of the
governing fact that Valentine is acting according to
Renaissance idealism, not according to the probabilities
of human behavior governing the actions of a young man
"in love" in the modern sense of the word. Valentine has
to be recognized as the personification of the ideal
courtly friend for whom no sacrifice or surrender is too
great so long as it be in the sacred name of friendship.
Recognizing the ideological background of the play
and the conventions that shape its action is not the same,
however, as saying that it is a well-constructed stage
120
piece. The material is too refractory to be adapted to
the Elizabethan popular stage without some extensive alter
ations being made first. These alterations have not been
made, however, because at this point in his irregular
progress the playwright does not seem to have a suffi
ciently well developed sense of comic conflict. Struc
turally, the play cries out for an alazon, like Duke
Ferdinand in Lovefs Labour’s Lost, who is the proponent
of a false society and who is being attacked by an eiron,
like Berowne, who voices the prejudices of the audience
and their resistance to the false tenets of the would-be
usurping society. In this play, the B plot is composed
entirely of alazons. The eirons from the C plot, Launce
and Speed, are not developed enough dramatically to serve
in a sustained ironic parody of the main plot: for one
thing, they lack a Jaquenetta or an Audrey as a counter
part to the romantic heroine. Shakespeare has too readily
accepted the values of his alazons, whose true comic role
he is not yet aware of, and does not exploit them as fit
sources of humor. They are shielded by an impossibly
idealized code from the salutary influence of laughter
which would convert them to the ways of the "normal"
society represented by the audience-surrogate, the eiron.
For these reasons the theory that this play is a
121
deliberate p a r o d y ^ of the conventions of the romance
tradition does not seem to be a tenable one. Rather than
being a sophisticated outsider the playwright seems to be
more the naive insider. If this parody theory were the
correct appraisal of the tone and purpose of the play,
there would have been an eiron in the B plot to serve as
the standard against which the ridiculous could be measured,
or the C plot would have been developed in greater detail
to emphasize the folly, if such it was intended to be, of
the actions in the B plot. The playwright's preoccupation
with the B plot to the virtual neglect of the other poten
tial plots would seem to indicate that he was interested in
it for its own sake but simply could not handle it as
effectively as he wished. If it had been parody, Valentine
and Proteus would have been rendered laughable in the con
ventionalized resolution scene by having their purposes
crossed, but there is no indication of this at all. Rather
than a deliberate parody, it would seem more likely that
it is only an unconscious one brought about by the inept
ness of the playwright in attempting to handle refractory
material.
Besides being conditioned by elements from medieval
romance and Renaissance philosophy, the play is also
6H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago,
1951), pp. 42-46.
122
influenced by ritualistic elements that tie it in with the
medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual play. Frye calls
a play of this type "the drama of the green world,” its
plot being associated with the ritual theme of the triumph
of life over sterility and death. The action of such a
play begins in a world represented as the ordinary worka
day world, moves into the "green world," undergoes a
metamorphosis there in which the resolution of the action
is effected, and returns finally to the sphere of mundane
events. The forest of this play is a sparser version of
the fairy world of A Midsummer Night's Dream and an embry
onic one of the idyllic pastoral forest in As You Like It.
All these "green world" comedies exhibit the same alterna
tion between the ordinary "gray" world and the magic
"green" one. This second world, or world of enchantment,
is found only in Shakespeare's romantic comedies, being
absent from the ironic ones like Measure for Measure and
All's Well That Ends Well. This "green world" charges the
romantic comedies with the symbolism of the victory of
spring over winter, as is explicitly represented in the
anti-masque ending of Love's Labour's Lost, where the play
closes with a song and dance fashioned after the medieval
debats between spring, the symbol of fertility and life,
and winter, the symbol of sterility and death.
^Frye, pp. 181-184.
123
The difficulty in this play arises not from the use
of a ritualistic element in the plot, but from a failure
to exploit it fully, as the playwright later does in A
Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, where magic of
the forest is carried to its highest dramatic use. With
out the willing suspension of disbelief enlisted by magic,
the events in this play become merely weakly motivated
incredibilities relying on idealistic conventions for their
acceptance by the audience. With the addition of forest
magic, these same actions become the engaging youthful
excesses of the playwright's later triumphs in romantic
comedy. Without the supra-rational and the kaleidoscope
of magic to diffuse a softer light on them, the actions
of the lovers in this too-real forest between Milan and
Mantua become simply trivial improbabilities. The play
wright has not yet learned how to cast the mantle of
acceptability on basically improbable events. The device
used in this play, the forest outlaws who conveniently
immobilize all the principal characters of the B plot in
one spot at one time, is palpably an ineptly used deus ex
machina, not an integrated part of a multi-level plot with
the bandits being part of a complicating and resolving D
plot. "Neither before nor after The Two Gentlemen of
Verona has dramatic literature known a band of outlaws
like to these— except once: there are the Pirates of
124
Penzance; but then Gilbert meant his to be f u n n y . "8 The
trip to the "green world" may look here as though the play
wright has got himself lost in the woods, but actually he
has returned with a pocketful of dramatic acorns that will
yield the magic oaks of Arden and the woods of Athens.
A summary of the plot of this initial venture into
the "green world" shows how sorely in need of the world of
fancy is this combination of romance and comedy. The
lovers occupy the center of the action without showing the
genuine passion necessary to elevate their doings to any
real level of interest. In the absence of genuine passion,
they deserve a subordinate role; the B plot should be
minimized, but the playwright does not do this as he later
does with the actions of Hermia and Lysander, Helen and
Demetrius. At this stage of his development, he puts
romantic narrative into a loose dramatic form and appends
to it the title "comedy" primarily because he has managed
to contrive a happy ending and has comic interludes with
his clowns adding merriment to the general proceedings but
nothing to the development of a multi-level structure.
These clowns are not true participants in a dramatic
action; they are essentially bomolochoi or partakers of
the general festivity. The contrived happy ending is
reached by the most precipitous concatentation of absurd
^Charlton, p. 40.
125
events unalleviated by any skilful ordering of final scenes
based on the repetition of comic reversals or deflation of
the pseudo-heroic, although he approaches the latter device
timidly in the actions of Sir Thurio.
The play takes its name from the two chief male charac
ters , Valentine and Proteus, two young gentlemen of Verona
platonically devoted to one another. Valentine, ("true
lover"), resolved to seek honor and preferment at the
court of Milan, takes leave of his friend Proteus, ("change
able one"). The latter remains behind in Verona to pursue
a budding love-affair with Julia, a much sought-after
young gentlewoman of that city. Just when he has made
progress in his wooing, his father, influenced by the
example of Valentine’s father, decides to send his own son
to court to improve his prospects instead of wasting his
time at home in idle pursuits.
In Milan it is now Valentine’s turn to be smitten by
the beauty of a young woman. The young lady who has him
in thrall is Silvia, the daughter of the Duke of Milan.
It is she who is the aggressive one in the wooing, com
missioning Valentine to write love-letters for her to a
"friend." She returns these letters to him in person
with the request that they be written more movingly. He
is informed by his servant Speed that the letters are
really intended for him. But his happy union with Silvia
is obstructed by the Duke’s plans to match her with Sir
126
Thurio, a suitor eligible because of his wealth and social
position.
Back in Verona, Proteus has taken his enforced fare
well of Julia to whom he has sworn eternal constancy in
an exchange of rings. On his arrival in Milan, Velentine
greets him lovingly, boasts of Silvia’s rare beauty, dis
closes his plans for elopement, and enlists his friend's
loyalty and assistance. Proteus, however, is also smitten
by the beauty of Silvia, so much so that he completely
forgets about his vows of fidelity to Julia and his obli
gation of undying loyalty to his friend. To clear the way
for his own wooing of Silvia, he plans to betray his
trusting friend's secret to the Duke. Meanwhile, Julia,
unable to remain long separated from her "true" love,
dons the costume of a boy and leaves Verona in search of
her lover.
The faithless Proteus betrays the secret of the
impending elopement to Silvia's father. Upon learning the
news, the Duke seeks out Valentine, tricks him into tel
ling him about the rope-ladder under the pretext that he
needs one for his own wooing, and then punishes the young
man by banishing him from the duchy. Now that Valentine
has been removed as an obstacle to the fulfilment of his
own desires, Proteus pursues his illicit courtship by
pretending to aid the courtship of the fatuous Thurio.
In flight from the Duke's wrath, Valentine is waylaid
127
by a band of brigands who inhabit the nearby forest. They
are so impressed by their captive's manly beauty that they
enlist him into their ranks as their leader. In Milan,
Proteus continues his suit of Silvia, all the while pre
tending to be the go-between and confidant of Sir Thurio.
In the midst of this intrigue, Julia arrives in Milan,
takes lodgings in an inn, and overhears her faithless lover
serenading another woman. Julia seeks and gains employment
as a page to her fickle lover and is immediately despatched
by him on an errand to Silvia to give her the very ring he
had received from Julia in pledge of their love. The
unwavering Silvia refuses the gift and in talking to the
supposed page learns something of the wronged Julia.
To follow after the banished Valentine, Silvia flees
Milan in company with Sir Eglamour, a devoted servitor of
Love. The brigands capture her, but she is rescued by
Proteus and the page. Proteus woos her ardently and
threatens physical conquest to overcome her resistance.
He is overheard by Valentine, who chances to be in a
nearby cave. The grievously wronged lover and friend
makes his presence known and the false lover and friend
bows down and begs his forgiveness. The magnanimous
Valentine forgives his erring friend and even confers all
his interest in the lady Silvia on the repentant friend.
At this blow to her hopes, Julia faints and her true
identity becomes known. In the midst of this confusion,
128
the Duke and Thurio, also taken captive by the bandits,
are brought before Valentine, the outlaw chieftain.
Thurio refuses to fight for the hand of a woman who does
not love him, and the Duke then confers his daughter's
hand on Valentine. Proteus and Julia are now free to
re-unite; the brigands are all pardoned; and the entire
assembly returns happily to Milan, all wrongs righted,
all problems, present and future, solved.
A structural analysis of the play surprisingly shows
more evidence of dramatic skill than one might suppose
from this series of accidents and incredibilities. Struc
turally the play can be considered as one of developing
action, leading to complications of intrigue and irony,
which is resolved through the agency of an extrinsic fac
tor and which ends in a state of equilibrium. The subplot
provides an atmosphere of earthy levity to parody the
romantic seriousness of the main action. The opening
situation is a complex one but one with no lines of comic
conflict immediately apparent. The dramatist has struc
tured three interests which are initially independent of
one another: the platonized friendship of Valentine and
Proteus, "the two gentlemen of Verona"; the love of one
of them, Proteus, for Julia; and in Milan, the piece of
social matchmaking involving Silvia, her father the Duke,
129
and the favored suitor, Sir Thurio.9
The impetus for the first complication in the action
arises from physical movement, that of Valentine to Milan.
Plot movement, then, is initially dependent on spatial
movement. Valentine’s arrival in Milan initiates the first
phase of the complicating action by his falling in love
with Silvia and having his love reciprocated. Here we
have the first line of comic conflict drawn, one that goes
back to Greek and Roman comedy: the young lovers are
opposed by the will of the senex and by the favored court
ship of a wealthy rival for the young lady’s hand. Unfor
tunately, however, this conflict is never developed along
comic lines: it pursues a romantic course from beginning
to end and never contributes to the laughter except
indirectly and unintentionally. The Duke and Sir Thurio
are never developed adequately as comic blocking figures
representing a false society that has to be overcome.
This love of Valentine for Silvia becomes the basis of an
intrigue, since it must be concealed from the hostile
eyes of the father and the favored suitor. This intrigue,
in turn, leads to further complications: it lays the
groundwork for the reversals of role and of fortune in
the scene where Proteus betrays his friend’s secret in
^R. G. Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare,
(New York, 1907), pp. 222-228.
130
the second complication of the developing action. Valen
tine’s movement to Milan is also the motive force for the
complicating action in the Proteus-Julia complex: it
provides an ironic motivating circumstance for the physical
separation and emotional alienation of these two lovers
and the intrigues which result therefrom.
The second impetus for complicating the action comes
from a second physical transplantation. This time it is
the movement of Proteus which acts as the force. Actually
his movement is a derivative of the first movement, that
of Valentine to Milan. Like the first movement, this also
sets up the stage for an intrigue, only this time a more
involved one. First of all, there is the intrigue in
love: Proteus must keep his disloyal infatuation for
Silvia a secret until he has removed or circumvented the
obstacles to his success. Secondly, there is an intrigue
in friendship: Proteus must devise a means to deceive
and undo his most intimate friend to whom he is supposedly
bound by ties of undying loyalty. Finally, there is an
intrigue against the social conventions governing courtship
and marriage: Proteus pretends to be serving the interests
of the legitimate suitor but is actually working in his
own interests thereby deceiving the suitor, the father,
and the young lady. Proteus is well aware of this three
fold intrigue and he brings it to the attention of the
audience.
131
Already have I been false to Valentine
And now I must be as unjust to Thurio.
Under the color of commending him,
I have access my own love to prefer.
But Silvia is too fair, too true, too holy,
To be corrupted with my worthless gifts.
When I protest true loyalty to her,
She twits me with my falsehood to my friend;
When to her beauty I commend my vows,
She bids me think how I have been forsworn
In breaking faith with Julia whom I loved;
And notwithstanding all her sudden quips,
The least whereof would quell a lover’s hope,
Yet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love,
The more it grows, and fawneth on her still.
(IV.ii.1-15)
In the third complication impetus is again provided
by physical movement: this time that of Julia to Milan
in the guise of a boy. This movement produces a situation
of multiple ironic reversals accruing from the multiple
intrigue. The intrigue in love on the part of Julia and
the one on the part of Proteus produce the reversal of
fortune in which Julia overhears her false lover singing
a serenade not to her, his legitimate love, who is present
on the scene, but to an ineligible and unwilling rival.
Host. Now, young guest, methinks you're allycholy.
I pray you, why is it?
Jul. Marry, mine host, because I cannot be merry.
Host. Come, we'll have you merry. I'll bring you where
you shall hear music and see the gentleman that you
ask'd for.
Jul. But shall I hear him speak?
Host. Ay, that you shall.
Jul. That will be music. (Music plays)
Host. Hark, hark.'
Jul. Is he among these?
Host. Ay; but peace! let's hear ’em.
Song.
Who is Silvia? What is she,
132
To her let us garlands bring.
Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before:
How do you, man? The music likes you not.
Jul. You mistake; the musician likes me not.
Host. Why, my pretty youth?
Jul. He plays false, father.
Host. How? Out of tune on the strings?
Jul. Not so; but yet so false that he grieves my very
heart strings.
Host. You have a quick ear.
Jul. Ay, I would I were deaf; it makes me have a slow
heart. (IV.ii.26-61)
There is also an ironic reversal of intention in the friend
ship relationship in that Proteus serves to effect a rap
port between Silvia and Julia which counterbalances the
ruptured friendship between him and Valentine.
Jul. Madam, he sends your ladyship this ring.
Sil. The more shame for him that he sends it me; For
I have heard him say a thousand times
His Julia gave it him at his departure.
Though his false finger have profan’d the ring,
Mine shall not do his Julia so much wrong.
Jul. She thanks you.
Sil. What say’st thou?
Jul.- I thank you, madam, that you tender her.
Poor gentlewoman! My master wrongs her much.
Sil. She is beholding to thee, gentle youth.
Alas, poor lady, desolate and left!
I weep myself to think upon thy words.
Here youth, there is my purse; I give thee this
For thy sweet mistress' sake, because thou lov'st her.
Farewell.
Jul. And she shall thank you for’t, if e'er you know
her. A virtuous gentlewoman, mild and beautiful!
(IV.iv.137-185)
An ironic reversal of roles results from the social
intrigue of Proteus. By the gulling of the legitimate
suitor, Sir Thurio, the go-between, Proteus, is allowed
to assume the role of actual lover suing in his own
133
behalf. Julia, paradoxically, is used in her office of
page as an accomplice of Proteus to underline the irony
of the situation in the asides she makes commenting on
the inanity of Sir Thurio.
Thu. Sir Proteus, what says Silvia to my suit?
Pro. 0, sir, I find her milder than she was;
And yet she takes exceptions at your person.
Thu. What, that my leg is too long?
Pro. No; that it is too little.
Thu. I’ll wear a boot, to make it somewhat rounder.
Jul. (Aside) But love will not be spurr’d to what it
loathes.
Thu. What says she to my face?
Pro. She says it is a fair one.
Thu. Nay, then the wanton lies; my face is black.
Pro. But pearls are fair; and the old saying is,
Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.
Jul. (Aside) ’Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies’
eyes.
For I had rather wink than look on them.
Thu. How likes she my discourse?
Pro. Ill, when you talk of war.
Thu. But well, when I discourse of love and peace?
Jul. (Aside) But better, indeed, when you hold your
peace. (V.ii.1-18)
In order to resolve the multiple intrigue and to
dissipate the multiple irony, the dramatist has recourse to
another physical movement, one which produces a re-align
ment of characters. This is accomplished through the
movement effected by the banishment of Valentine, a move
ment which was initiated by the intrigue of Proteus against
friendship. But physical movement has taken the dramatist
as far as he can go: movement must now be halted by a
blocking force which brings about the resolution. Valen
tine must be stopped, and so also must all of those who
follow in the wake of his banishment: Silvia and Sir
134
Eglamour, Proteus and the page (Julia), the Duke and Sir
Thurio. This stopping force is provided by the outlaws.
They stop Valentine and incorporate him into the stopping
force and are finally absorbed into and neutralized by
the last moving force so that a state of equilibrium
results. They also furnish the occasion for the leaving
of the "green" world to return to the "ordinary'' one.
The sustained irony of the plot thus intensifies to
the point where the moving and stopping forces meet, and
new combinations, or more properly the old ones, result:
the faithful Julia wins back a repentant Proteus; Silvia
and Valentine are reunited; and the outlaws return to
Milan under ducal amnesty. At this point the irony fades
into pure romance. Just before this point is reached,
the action has Proteus forcing his unwanted attentions
on the protesting Silvia, who is apparently helpless in
the forest but ironically is within range of her true
love's protection. This ultimate breach of friendship
and love leads ironically to a healing of the rupture.
This healing involves a conferring of Silvia on Proteus
by the forgiving Valentine; but this action in turn causes
Julia to swoon and, by so doing, reveal her true identity.
By some subtle alchemy of romance this restores her claim
on Proteus, and Valentine and Silvia are left to pair off.
The only remaining obstacle to this, Sir Thurio, ironi
cally declines the favored position accorded him by the
135
Duke. Valentine wins by default and he and Silvia are
reunited. The intrigue and irony is all behind them.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that the novice
has devised a creditable scheme of interlocking actions
following a neat and balanced pattern, but he has used
physical movement as his main propelling and unifying
force to the almost complete exclusion of characterization
and plausible motivation. Things happen because people
are brought together by the exigencies of the story not
because their characters are so structured that what they
do is determined by what they are. He has succeeded in
constructing a good set of plot complications, but it is a
house of cards, supported by the props of accident and
the guy-wires of convention, which topples to the ground
in the forced agitation of a hastily contrived resolution.
This structural analysis would indicate that when
Shakespeare wrote this play, he was aware that audiences
like a crowded and complicated story. To satisfy this
desire, he provides this involved plot based on multiple
intrigue and multiple ironic reversals. He even attempts
hesitantly to parody it with a clownish subplot. But
involved as this scheme is, it still shows that he is at
the beginning of his dramatic development. He is aware
of the necessity of contrast and counterbalance, and he
alternates his scenes of romance and comedy in order to
achieve this. Sometimes he even splits scenes down the
136
middle to attain this tonal contrast as in Act I, scene i
where a serious conversation between Valentine and Proteus
is followed by a verbal quibble of equal length that takes
place between Proteus and Speed. The difficulty is that
these contrasts are too obvious and too overdone. They
are thrown in because he needs them rather than being
made an integral part of the plot. Launce*s lecture to
his shoes in Act II, scene iii is amusing in itself, but
it is a comic interlude rather than an intrinsic element
of the plot.
Shakespeare’s awkwardness in handling tonal contrast
is matched by his ineptitude in providing expository
material. At this stage in the development of his dramatic
technique he requires ten scenes sprawled over two whole
acts to set up the relations between the main participants
in the action: Valentine with Proteus, Proteus with
Julia, Valentine with Silvia, and Launce and Speed with
one another and with the others. This stringing out of
static expository material and transitional scenes
seriously impedes the tempo of the play and sacrifices
legitimate suspense for pedestrian clarity. By the time
of the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream he has
developed his sense of pace so well that the audience
knows quickly what the state of affairs is and immediately
becomes involved in the rapid progress of the developing
action. Here the audience is provided with too much time
137
in which to grow restive and indifferent as the playwright
inexpertly tries to propel his action forward from a static
beginning.
It has been justly remarked that:
He would have done all this in at most three scenes a
few years later: one, as now, showing the planning of
Julia with Lucetta to leave Verona and go to the court
in search of Proteus; one preceding scene for Launce
and Speed; and a longer scene, now scene 4 of Act II,
in Milan at the Duke’s palace, where the coming of Pro
teus to the court would bring out clearly his previous
relations with Valentine and Julia, the love of Valen
tine for Silvia, the sudden infatuation of Proteus for
her, and the place of Thurio in the story. 1®
It is not until the play moves into Act III that
there is any degree of suspense built up for the audience.
Proteus' betrayal of Valentine to the Duke is used to
set up the suspense-building scene where the rope-ladder
is discovered and Valentine is banished.
Duke. Now, as thou art a gentleman of blood,
Advise me where I may have such a ladder.
Val. When would you use it? Pray, sir, tell me that?
Duke. This very night; for Love is like a child,
That longs for everything that he can come by.
Val. By seven o'clock I'll get you such a ladder.
Duke. But, hark thee; I will go to her alone.
How shall I best convey the ladder thither?
Val. It will be light, my lord, that you may bear it.
Under a cloak that is of any length.
Duke. A cloak as long as thine will serve the turn?
Val. Ay, my good lord.
Duke. Then let me see thy cloak.
I *ll get me one of such another length.
Val. Why, any cloak will serve the turn, my lord.
Duke. How shall I fashion me to wear a cioak?
I pray thee, let me feel thy cloak upon me.
■^George Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a
Dramatist (New York, 1923), pp. 118-119.
138
What letter is this same: What’s here? "To Silvia"!
And here an engine fit for my proceeding!
Go base intruder! Overweening slave!
And think my patience, more than thy desert,
Is privilege for thy departure hence. (Ill.i.121-39;
157-60)
The treachery of Proteus in urging Valentine to flee Milan
serves to heighten the dramatic impact of the scene.
Furthermore the ensuing dialogue of Speed and Launce offers
the audience an amusing parody of the romantic scene and
affords relief from the dramatic tension until the drama
tist is ready to build it up again. Launce’s comment on
the intrusion of Speed into the privacy of his love letter
echoes the conflict between Valentine and Proteus and
points to the course the resolution will follow:
Launce. Now will he be swinged for reading my letter,--
an unmannerly slave, that will thrust himself into
secrets! I’ll after, to rejoice in the boy’s correc
tion. (III.i.392-395).
Here the playwright has used an effective dramatic
sequence consisting of treachery, exposure, and banish
ment; and has counterpointed it by a scene of parody
contrasting in tone with the main action but echoing it
in content. Not only is this scene effective and amusing
in itself; it also serves the purpose of propelling the
action forward so that the audience will be concerned with
the outcome of the perfidy of the faithless friend and
the manner of his discovery. The main difficulty is that
scenes like this are few and far between in this play.
139
Furthermore, the expectations that are built up here are
never sustained by subsequent scenes and the effectiveness
of this climactic action is lost in the dramatic inepti
tude of the resolution scene.
In the scene following the climactic rope-ladder
scene, the action slows down to that of a transitional
one, which it actually is, to prepare for the action that
Proteus will now take in his intrigues against friendship,
love, and social propriety. The general effect of this
scene involving Proteus, the Duke, and Thurio is drama
tically felicitous. The audience has seen the action rise
to a crisis, been relieved of its tension through the use
of comic contrast, and now it is being prepared to antici
pate the subsequent action on the part of the main mover
of the plot, Proteus.
The next act is dramatically uneven, being a melange
of sketchily handled scenes and skilfully handled vignettes.
The first scene, showing the brigands capturing Valentine,
has nothing to recommend it dramatically. It is inserted
merely to serve the exigencies of the plot and to compen
sate for the playwright’s lack of experience. It is
neither fearsome so as to excite pity and fear, nor does
it employ comic reversals so as to excite laughter. It
is simply a contrived bit of action that provides the
playwright with his needed blocking force. He needs this
scene so that he can prepare for his resolution in which
140
the audience may "rejoice at the boy's correction." The
brigands could have been used to add to the comic tone by
creating a bomolochos or agroikos (a refuser of the revels),
among them to delight the audience with his buffoonish
antics or churlish speech and also to serve as an active
participant in the resolving action, but this he fails to
do. They are all handled so inartistically, as is Valen
tine, that they become laughable in a way the dramatist
probably never intended.
From the standpoint of plot mechanics scenes i and ii
of Act III show definite evidence of a developing sense of
stagecraft. From the standpoint of characterization and
human interest, scene ii of Act IV is probably the best
in the play. Here the action is built about the ironic
situation of Julia, the love-lorn maiden, eavesdropping on
a love-song sung by her lover but not to her. It is an
effective scene not only because of the comic reversals
in it but also because it serves to take Julia out of the
category of mere "love-object" and place her in the cate
gory of "woman-in-love." This is an essential change that
the playwright has to effect if he is ever to infuse life
into the ethereal substance of romance. He is working
toward a solution of the problem of motivation through
characterization, and he is coming close to the answer.
Besides being good in characterization, the scene is good
in other respects also. For one thing, it helps to move
I
141
the action forward another step. Since Julia now knows
that Proteus is false to her, the audience can expect that
something will result from this in the way of further com
plications and eventual resolution. The unfortunate part
of all this is that the playwright does not use this
auspicious characterization development to help him effect
the denouement. He creates the structure for what could
prove to be an effective resolution, and then he simply
abandons it in favor of resolution by accident.
After a short transitional scene in which Silvia is
shown making preparations to escape from Milan in search
of her banished lover, the audience is again provided with
a scene in which Julia is further humanized toward the
role of "woman-in-love” and away from that of mere "love-
object" for the conventional lover of the fine amor tradi
tion. (This scene is preceded by the humorously contrasting
one in which the tone of romantic love is parodied in
Launce’s complete and abject devotion to his dog Crab who
is forgiven and loved in spite of the foulest of offenses.)
The delicate irony of this encounter scene between Julia
and Silvia gives portents of better things to come in such
plays as Twelfth Night where Olivia and Viola participate
in a similar scene. It is not as deftly done here in
this novice work nor as well sustained, but the playwright
is not far from the dramatic desideratum of providing
appropriate characterization as a necessary counterpart to
142
an intricate plot.
But subsequent to this point the dramatist’s lack of
experience and foresight betrays him. Nothing he has done
in the fourth act, aside from the insipid scene suggesting
that Silvia is planning to run away, prepares for a
resolution to the complications he has labored so hard
to produce. It is now the burden of the fifth act to
unravel this complicated knot, but it fails abysmally in
its mission. The first scene is merely a weak repetition
of something we already know. Showing Silvia in flight in
company with the dramatically superfluous Sir Eglamour is
closer to exposition, or at the most transition, than it
is to dramatic action. The playwright is using it as a
bridge to prepare for the cross-over from complication to
resolution, but it is too fragile a structure to carry the
weight of all the complications loaded on it. He needs
something much more dramatic and suspense-building such
as the discovery scene in Act III, but in a lesser key.
He might have used a change of garments between Julia,
the supposed page, and Silvia thereby creating an ironic
reversal of roles that might have led to an amusing scene
of threatened rape instead of a stereotyped melodramatic
one.
The second scene of this last act is also transi
tional, being used to show that the Duke and Sir Thurio
have also left Milan, followed by Proteus and Julia, and
143
can be expected to turn up where the playwright needs them
in order to work out his resolution. A flimsy bit of
action occurs in scene iii when Silvia is captured by the
brigands with the superfluous Sir Eglamour nowhere in
evidence. With two-thirds of his last act gone by, the
playwright has only crudely structured the elements of
his resolution. He has one scene left in which to effect
a satisfactory and entertaining resolution. But it is in
this vital scene that the dramatist exposes his greatest
deficiencies of artistic technique: he cannot handle the
resolution of the complicated plot he has constructed. He
has shown he can develop and complicate his plot quite
skilfully, but he cannot unravel his own tangled skein
without resorting to the grossest of instruments and the
most palpable of dodges. Later he will be able to handle
this problem more skilfully, but in this apprentice
effort, every character is stripped of any humanity that
might have been developed in earlier scenes. Gone is the
appeal that Julia had developed in the previous act: she
takes no active part in the scene, her only contribution
being an anguished sigh and a swoon. Proteus is not
allowed to display any genuine emotion that might make his
treachery understandable or his plea for pardon believable.
Valentine is the mere walking shadow of courtly magnani
mity, and Silvia reverts to being a mere Mlove-object'*
and loses any claim to redeeming femininity she might
144
have shown promise of earlier in her scene with Julia.
The scene is so poorly structured that it almost makes one
forget everything of value that went before it: the
suspense-building of Act III, the humanizing of Julia and
Silvia in Act IV, and the intricate weaving of intrigue
and ironic reversals. The playwright has forfeited all
right to audience interest by a resolution scene that is
too weak to be deserving of the name. Rather it should be
called a "retreat" scene because the playwright abandons
his forces on the field of battle with a hastily scribbled
truce. Although he is aware of the value of a complicated
plot and the necessity of creating suspense leading up to
a single climactic action, he cannot yet proportion his
early scenes to draw the audience into the action imme
diately, nor can he artistically resolve in his final
scene the complications he has managed to contrive earlier.
He has solved the problem of the middle of the play, but
the proper handling of the beginning and end still requires
much work.
As has been pointed out, much of his difficulty arises
from the fact that he has not devoted enough attention to
character development; nor does he use what characteriza
tion he has achieved to genuinely structural advantage.
The work he does on Julia, Silvia, and Launce goes to
waste since none of it is used to contribute to the
resolution. Along with having Silvia and Julia exchange
145
identities, he could have used Launce as a go-between to
the supposed Silvia and perhaps have effected a resolution
through the blunderings of the clown.
The other characters are so bound by the conventional
limitations of romance that they never achieve any drama
tic existence. Any life that Julia and Launce achieve
arises from the fact that they are permitted to escape
these limitations or lie outside them in the first place.
If only Valentine or Proteus had been allowed to escape
also, the dramatist could have used that character along
with the other two to effect a dramatically satisfying
resolution. But, as it is, the weight of romance is too
heavy, especially when the playwright does not use the
very levers which he himself has created to move this
inert mass of convention and idealism.
His levers consisted of characters like Julia and
Launce, those outside the restrictions of romance. Although
it is cause for disappointment that he does not fully
exploit them in this play, they are reincarnated in later
characters and serve their purposes admirably in other
plays. In Viola and Rosalind character is allowed to
motivate the complications and effect the resolution
without so heavy a reliance on accident and convention as
to mar the total effect of the play as occurs here.
Launce is as much out of his element in this con
ventionalized romance as is the womanly Julia. He has no
146
real right to wander about in the fragile precincts of
romance, but fortunately for the sake of humor in the
play he has gained admission. He and Costard are elder
brethren of the incomparable Bottom, the bell-ringer for
the funeral of romance that takes itself too seriously.
The defect is not in Launce, but in the limited use to
which the playwright puts him. He uses his clown pri
marily for comic interludes, tentative parody, and
messengerial functions in the main action. It is not until
he creates Bottom that he realizes what a dramatic gem
he has and really uses him as a clown should be used when
he is part of a play. In this play, comedy is only
interpolated with romance: it is not woven into its
fabric as it later is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Clownage and pantomiming are at their height with Launce
and his shoe and his dog, but the laughter they occasion
never spills over into the rest of the play.
In this present effort to create "romantic comedy"
there is too much "romance" and not enough "comedy," at
least not enough comedy which is produced by the main
action. The playwright does not seem aware yet of the
comic possibilities of the central action. He is handling
it much too gingerly, as though it were too sacred to
tamper with other than by complicating the action to build
up intrigue and suspense. It is this attitude of respect,
147
along with his incompetence in handling his exposition
and resolution, that undoes his efforts. He has to learn
to develop an attitude of irreverence toward lofty roman
tic ideals of love and friendship and see the absurdities
inherent in the idealized excesses they are carried to in
stories such as this one. The audience is asked to laugh
and scoff at Sir Thurio and align itself with Valentine,
but the laughter works in a perverse manner. Rather than
Sir Thurio being the self-deluded one and therefore
laughable, it is Valentine who is. For the playwright to
ask the audience of a comedy to align itself with the
deluded one is asking for a reversal of the traditional
attitude. It can be done, as Cervantes proved later, but
not with a character as conventionally drawn as Valentine.
If Shakespeare had wanted us to laugh at Sir Thurio, he
should have developed his pretenses as a pseudo-hero more
and then exposed his true cowardice under a test as
Jonson does with his gulls in The Silent Woman. We are
asked to laugh at Sir Thurio because he is gullible and
yet not possessed of any serious self-delusion as is
Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He simply will not bear the
burden of much laughter. All the laughter in the main
situation, if there is any, will be directed toward
Valentine and the absurd conventions he exemplifies, at
least as far as a modern audience is concerned. The spirit
of comedy is too closely allied to common sense to be on
148
the side of impractical magnanimity and stereotyped valor.
"Clearly, Shakespeare’s first attempt to make romantic
comedy had only succeeded so far that it had unexpectedly
and inadvertently made romance comic. "11-
Even though characterization is inadequately developed
and used and the action suffers from poor mechanics of
exposition and resolution, the play might still have been
salvaged by the use of the proper atmosphere and tone.
For atmosphere he has selected the rarefied clime of
Renaissance romance with geography and time distorted to
fit the needs of the plot. One travels from Verona to
Milan by a sea-voyage and banishment is followed immedia
tely by the proclamation of a ducal edict, the posting of
border guards, and the committal of the heroine to prison
by her stern father, all occurring in the course of a
soliloquy that requires but seventeen lines of text. But
even these would not have been serious faults had other
more important things been attended to. Had the atmos
phere been that of sylvan enchantment softening the
harshness of unpoetic reality, distortions of time and
place would have been of no consequence. The playwright
does not yet know how to call on the imagination of his
audience; he strives for an air of verisimilitude but fails
because his pretended reality is not real enough.
^Charlton, p. 43.
149
So also is the tone he creates inappropriate. Had
the tone been that of amused tolerance of the extravagances
and impossible idealism of youth he might have elicited
gentle forgiving laughter from his audience at the all-
too-human folly of his central characters. Had he been
content to make them mere puppets controlled by super
natural urges beyond their control instead of people pre
sumably motivated by rational considerations, he might
have made them endearing because of their human helpless
ness. As it is he makes them unbelievable because of the
incredibility of their motivations. Had he done all this,
it would, of course, have been another play. And that
is precisely what this play does become. It undergoes a
thorough metamorphosis and becomes his later successes
in romantic comedy: A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You
Like It.
The geographic impossibilities and the temporal
absurdities have nothing to do, then, with the real drama
tic shortcomings of the play. It does not really matter
for the purposes of comedy that Italy does not have inland
waterways between Verona and Milan. If the connections
within the character-action complex and within the
atmosphere-tone complex are consistent and valid, one
cares little about the connections between spots on a
map. Cowled monks lurking in forests inhabited by quixo
tic bandits do not disturb the spectator either. What is
150
disturbing is the failure on the part of the playwright
to use the devices he has created to their best advantage.
The outlaws could have been used as part of an atmos
pheric D plot as they later are in As You Like It or as
sprites of the forest as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
but instead they are used as comic opera banditti who
contribute to the action by a series of improbable acci
dents that render the action ludicrous rather than by
fanciful inventiveness that enlivens the action. Their
fault is that they are not corporeal enough and at the
same time are too corporeal. Had one been able to poke
a finger right through their seeming solid flesh, one
might have been more content with their intervention.
Had they been voices on the wind or music in the air, they
would have served their purpose better, but the playwright
is not emancipated enough from pseudo-reality to use
out-and-out fantasy. He is inhibited by respect for a
pseudo-reality which is farther from the truth of life
than is pure fantasy. But he has poked his finger prob-
ingly into the ribs of these too corporeal denizens of
the forest and is ready to turn them into intangible, airy
nothings whose insubstantiality will do more for his plot
structure than a mountain of flesh. These minions of
Valentine are too cumbersome; they only appear to be
facilitating action when actually they are stifling truly
dramatic activity. With a theme as insubstantial as this,
151
all pretense to reality must be abandoned; otherwise, one
invites comparison by realistic standards which will
destroy the credibility of the action portrayed. Puck
and Ariel are more "natural” spirits of such a forest as
this than are these papier mache brigands of Shakespeare’s
Italy. But this one mistake has been enough; the next
time the playwright knows how to handle the problem.
What would have helped to create the proper atmos
phere, had the playwright been aware that this was one of
the deficiencies of the play, would have been some degree
of beauty of language to lift this whole "lamentable
comedy" out of the realm of the prosaically romantic. But
the language is rarely beautiful: there are scarcely a
dozen lines worth repeating. The paucity of poetic lang
uage which characterizes this play can be seen in the
images which dominate or, more properly, which fail to
dominate the play and give it unity. The prevailing group
of images is taken from types and classes of people without
any apparent design. The dramatist uses similes involving
the child, the babe, the nurse, the physician, the beggar,
the pilgrim, the beadsman, the soldier, the swarthy
Ethiope, the herald, the prisoner, the slave, the bastard,
the messenger, etc. Julia, when she pretends lack of
interest in Proteus’ letter, says,
Fie, fie, how wayward is this foolish love,
That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse,
152
And presently, all humbled, kiss the rod.
(I.ii.57-59)
In the rope-ladder scene, the Duke says,
. . . For love is like a child,
That longs for everything that he can come by,
(III.i.124-125)
There is very likely no good reason why Shakespeare
uses so many of this type of image in the play and why he
repeats himself, as in the figures of speech involving
the melting of a frozen or waxen image, except that he
probably has no real sense yet of imagery being used to
create and sustain tone and atmosphere. He may have writ
ten the play hurriedly and not have spent too much time
on language.
For there is evidence, I think of haste of a kind we so
rarely find in later plays, in the many repetitions of
images, such as the comparison of the transitory nature
of love by Proteus to the thawing of a waxen image, and
by the duke to the melting of an ice figure; the referen
ces by both Proteus and Julia to ’Love’s wings’ and their
swift flight, the comparison of the hardness of Julia’s
nature to steel, and of the dog Grab’s to a ’pebble
stone*; and the two uses of the chameleon, and of the
spaniel.^
On the other hand, the playwright is beginning to use
language to a more dramatic purpose~~to develop character,
as with Julia, and to build suspense, as in the rope-ladder
scene between Valentine and the Duke— but he has gone too
far along the road to pure utility and too far away from
the paths of beauty and delight. This is the opposite
^Spurgeon, p. 268.
153
course to the one he pursued in Love's Labour’s Lost,
and it must be considered only a qualified success. But
he cannot abandon one element in favor of the other; he
must learn to combine beauty and utility. Language must
be used not only to develop character and to further
action; it must also be used to create a suitable tone
and atmosphere, to lend appeal through sound and imagery
to all that happens in the play. Emotions must become
lyrical, conflict must be charged with force of language,
the soul of a character must hang suspended in his speech,
and the poet must "give to airy nothingness a local
habitation.” All these must be done, but none of them
are done with any great measure of success in this early
effort. Up to this point in his development, when this
playwright forsakes poetry, he abandons his chief asset.
Recognizing his dramatic deficiencies, he has reacted so
strongly to correct them that he lets his most natural
talent fall into temporary discard. When he has mastered
the technique of plot manipulation and characterization,
he returns to language and uses it to complement the
mechanical aspects of playwrighting, thereby creating a
unified effect.
Despite the marks of professional inexperience and
possible haste, there are clear signs in the experimenting
with complicated intrigues and multiple reversals that the
playwright who was responsible for this near miss will not
154
long continue to miss the mark: he will soon strike the
targe of romantic comedy in dead center. What he has to
do now is to use the pattern of the A plot in The Comedy
of Errors with the elements of the B plot from this play,
with the latter parodied by a plot like the C plot in
Lovels Labour*s Lost. To this must be added beauty of
language and a D plot evolved from the outlaws of the
forest of Milan. Once he does this, he will have the
multi-level, tonally contrasting structure of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, the next comedy he writes.
CHAPTER IV: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
In studying the first three plays, the procedure had
been to submit them to a detailed structural analysis in
which attention was centered on the ironic reversals at the
core of the various comic incidents. Consideration was
given to how these reversals arose from changes of iden
tity, character conflict, physical movement, and intrigue;
how they were arranged climactically; and how the rever
sals in one plot tonally balanced or contrasted with those
in other plots; and how one plot interacted with another
in producing complications or resolution or in being
complicated or resolved by another. Out of this study of
sometimes tedious detail, there emerged what seemed to be
a pattern toward which Shakespeare was moving. This
pattern clearly involved a multi-level, tonally contrasting
plot structure which was hinted at in the early comedies
but never fully realized. By perceiving what was missing,
one could see what would be created to fill the vacuum.
The study of this fourth selection— the play which
first uses the full A-B-C-D structure--pursues a different
method of investigation from that employed in the three
earlier comedies. Instead of going into the minute analy
sis of incident and scene as before, the inquiry has been
155
156
conducted on a more theoretical level, with the intention
of summarizing what has gone before to induce general
principles from the welter of fine detail— principles
which would clarify the ideal structure of Shakespearean
romantic comedy. Of necessity attention has been paid to
certain pertinent details of this play, but such details
are used primarily for illustration of the induced prin
ciples rather than as more raw data to be subjected to
close analysis.
It was only through the pedestrian effort involved
in the study of the earlier plays that material could be
accumulated to support subsequent generalizations. The
value of the previous, detailed study rests in great
measure on the validity of the A-B-C-D structural formula
which it led to and which exists in its ideal form in
A Midsummer Nights Dream and only imperfectly in the
three earlier comedies.
In these earlier works Shakespeare had imperfectly
employed devices to create a diverse but unified effect
which he never quite succeeded in achieving. Although he
had learned to handle the core of the comic situation
through the use of ironic reversals, to combine contrasting
tones from different plots, to construct a parodying
subplot structurally connected with the main plot, to use
language brilliantly, and to raise story to its highest
level of complication, he still had not achieved a
157
satisfactory synthesis of all the elements he had mastered
in one play. As soon as he had put one or two new elements
into a play, he failed to put in elements he had handled
successfully in a previous play. It was as though he was
too uncertain of his powers yet to divide his attention
among a wide range of complicated devices.
In The Comedy of Errors he had demonstrated he had
the talent to handle the basic pattern of Plautine comedy
with a high degree of success: he could handle rapid
entrances and exits adeptly and could skilfully arrange
ironic reversals in between which would lead to an ever
increasing state of confusion. He had succeeded in crea
ting a complicated comedy of situation, involving a clash
of four actions, through the use of errors caused by a
double shifting of identities. Out of his initial situa
tion of doublets, he succeeded in creating an amusing
series of complications and confusions involving ironic
reversals of intention, or roles, and of fortune in a
climactic pattern.
But successes on the level of mechanical manipulation
of plot were counterbalanced by marked weaknesses else
where. For one thing, the tone of the work had been
allowed to remain too long on the level of farce. He had,
it is true, contrived an A plot, or enveloping action,
with a contrasting, serious tone, but he had failed to
intersperse with the main farcical tone contrasting notes
158
from a parodying subplot (G plot) or from a complicating
and resolving D plot. He had a rudimentary C plot in
the antics involving Dromio of Syracuse and the kitchen
maid, but the tone was identical with that of the main
plot and the promised action of the C plot never developed
beyond a mere episode which contributed nothing substantial
to the structure of the play.
Furthermore, characterization had been shallow and
mechanical, the principals in the action being borrowed
mostly from Roman stage types with only minor modifica
tions. The only genuine exception had been Luciana.
Attempting to create a romantic heroine, he had spent
some poetry in her characterization that would make her a
woman, not just another blank-faced female necessitated
by the exigencies of the plot. In Roman comedy the women
were generally of two main types: the covetous courtesan
who satisfied the physical desires of men and the shrewish
wife whose affluence permitted the husband to philander*
but whose jealousy placed restrictions on him, with the
ensuing complications and intrigues being the source of
crude comedy. The young dramatist did not seem to have
been satisfied with this oversimplified division. He was
trying to create a female counterpart to the male comic
protagonist who would have full dramatic equality with him.
But the romantic heroine, beautiful in form and in soul,
does not spring full-blown from the head of the playwright;
159
she evolves slowly through several early attempts that
never quite succeed. Luciana is the first of these, her
attempted elevation occurring in the scene between her
and Antipholus of Syracuse: he praises her beauty, but
she gently upbraids him for his supposed infidelity to her
sister. Although this is only an abortive attempt, in
subsequent comedies he will spend more time and effort
in creating this romantic heroine who will play a role
dramatically equal to that of the male protagonist. In
fact, she will even come to dominate the comedy, as Rosa
lind does in As You Like It or Viola in Twelfth Night.
This attempt to elevate the romantic heroine to a role
of dramatic equality with the male is not one which
Shakespeare originated himself. He had probably observed
its limited use by Greene and had been impressed by its
possibilities enough to try it himself. At this stage of
his development he lacked the skill to exploit it properly,
but out of Greene's Dorothea and his Margaret of Fressing-
field no doubt came the germ of the idea for the more
fully conceived heroines of Shakespeare's mature romantic
comedy.
Another defect of his Roman effort which he soon
strove to remedy was the absence of any truly multi-level
action. The A plot, or enveloping action, was related to
the B plot in a purely linear manner. The two plots
intersected one another on the same plane and used the
160
same timetrack: the events of the main plot occurred in
between the events of the enveloping plot. The A plot was
suspended, as it were, for almost three acts while the B
plot was undergoing its complications and conflicts. Not
till these complications and conflicts reached their
climax did the A plot metronome start ticking again. This
linear relationship of plots left too much to be desired.
For one thing, it permitted the audience to lose awareness
of a contrasting tone for too long a time. As a result
of this time lapse, the total impact of the A plot would
be dissipated by the time it emerged again, and the play
wright would have to spend more time re-creating it. Time
spent in this task would slow down the pace of the reso
lution in the B plot and hamper its effectiveness. What
was needed was some kind of plot relationship involving
several concurrent actions, any one of which could be
brought to the foreground when the playwright saw fit to
contrast tones and heighten impact. Plautine comedy had
some of the static elements in the subordinate characters
which would make this contrast possible, but the play
wright did not yet know how to galvanize them into action
independent of the main plot. The two slaves are used
primarily as appendages to the main action; they do not
have a separate C plot working to complicate or resolve
the B plot or being worked on by some other plot. What
ever tone they add to the play is nothing but a
161
reinforcement which the play definitely does not need.
By accepting and adhering to the master-slave relationship
of the Roman comedy, the English playwright had limited
the dramatic possibilities open to him. He had not solved
the problem of detaching the Dromios from the B plot and
using them in their own space-time complex. This may
appear to be a problem easy of solution, but this is true
only because we can see how Shakespeare finally solved it
in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Actually, here again as with the elevation of the
romantic heroine, he did not conceive the basic solution
himself. The subplot was being used in Lyly’s court
comedy, and Shakespeare merely incorporated the device
into his own plays and developed it further. But he not
only imitated Lyly; he actually excelled him in the
intricacy and subtlety with which he used this key device
of the multi-level structure. It is easy to overlook the
dramatic achievement entailed in handling a complex plot
structure like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which
ties in three or four separate lines of action so that
they work independently yet influence one another and end
in a common resolution. Even though Shakespeare did not
himself originate the characterization device of elevation
of the romantic heroine or the multi-level plot with
contrasting tones, he did synthesize them into an organic
complex which he employed with a high level of artistic
162
excellence involving different variations of the basic
pattern. He perfected the formula of the interlocking
A-B-C-D plot structure and embellished it with a beauty
of language and skill of characterization which has tended
to obscure the real dramatic genius that went into the
construction of his recognized triumphs in romantic comedy.
Poetic touchstones have too often been used as the measure
of Shakespeare’s achievement. The real poetry of his
accomplishment lies in the broader sense of the word: it
exists in the artistic fashioning of the entire structure
not just in the beautiful diction that is the most easily
recognized feature of his greatness.
Despite its relatively barren language a n ' . ’ lack of
subtle characterization The Comedy of Errors has merit in
that it taught Shakespeare that one of the secrets of the
comic in life is the change of identities. Later on he
learned that it did not have to be a physical change but
could also be a change involving character. This is an
important lesson; Henry A. Myers even considers it to be
the basis of comedy, ’ ’ The world of nonsense is . . .
governed by a law which is the exact opposite of the law
of identity," which latter, he says, is the basis of the
world of sense and order.^ Shakespeare uses this prin
ciple as the basis of much of his comic structure. For
• ^ Tragedy: A View of Life (Ithaca, 1956), p. 121.
163
example, in his last comedy, The Tempest, Trinculo and
Caliban exchange their separate identities for that of a
four-legged monster to the confusion of Stephano and to
the delight of the audience. In The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare has effected this change of identities on the
primitive level of a set of identical twins. In some
plays he will use the physical device of disguise; in
others he will use the more subtle device of characteriza
tion so that the comic figure changes identity from self-
delusion, as Malvolio does in Twelfth Night or as Armado
does in Love * s Labour * s Los t.
If we take stock of Shakespeare's progress at this
stage of his development we can see what he has accomplished
and what he still has to solve. He can now handle a B
plot using ironic reversals based on physical changes of
identity to produce laughter. He can combine two anti
thetical tones by contrasting that of his A plot with a
dominant tone in the B plot. He can even interlock his
A and B plots so that they effect complications or reso
lutions in the other. But for initial plot movement he
has to rely on circumstances outside his main action. For
complications within the B plot he leans very heavily on
adventitious circumstance and coincidence. Characteriza
tion is stereotyped or, at best, rudimentary. Distinctions
have been made between the characters of the two Antipholi,
but they are scarcely of a critical sort. Both the
164
courtesan and Adriana are basically stereotypes, and
Luciana, like the mermaid that Antipholus of Syracuse
compares her to, is only part human. As yet the playwright
seems to have only the merest glimmer of a C plot and
apparently not the faintest notion of a D plot, a plot
which might help complicate and resolve the B or G plot
and have its own conflict resolved by one of the other
three plots.
Whether The Comedy of Errors preceded Love * s Labour * s
Lost or followed it is of no real moment. Structural
analysis would suggest that they both preceded A Midsummer
Night’s Dream even if there were no corroborating internal
or external evidence. What the playwright was doing in
these two plays was experimenting with two worlds of
comedy. In the Roman play he had been concerned with the
manipulation of incident as the basis of the comic. In
Love’s Labour’s Lost he was experimenting with language,
the parodying subplot, and theme as the basis of comedy.
In the Plautine comedy he had gone too far in the direction
of mere mechanics; in the Lyly-inspired effort too far in
the direction of quip and quibble and affected language in
general. One of his strongest points--his mastery of
poetic language— had become a dramatic liability here. He
had permitted language to overshadow plot interest so much
that the play might be considered a wasted effort struc
turally. What salvages it, however, is that he learned
165
something basic about the multi-level plot structure,
something that The Comedy of Errors shows little evidence
of. In this court comedy he was learning to develop the
C plot and use it to affect the action in the other plots
and lend a contrasting tone. Paradoxically, however, he
did not use the A plot as fully and successfully as he
had in the Roman comedy. Here also the A plot was used to
initiate the main conflict in the B plot, but the return
of the A plot in the form of Mercade strikes one as an
inartistic intrusion rather than as a careful, if somewhat
obviously arranged, convergence of events as did that
involving Aegeon and his two lost sons. Shakespeare seemed
to sense that he needed an A plot to contrast with the
tone of affectation and frivolity of the main plot, but
in the attempt to import into the play the tone of natural
events and serious concerns, he jars the audience into an
awakening it is too unprepared for after the prolonged
war of words. The tonal effect of Mercade!s arrival
serves to dispel rather than to create the illusion of
organic unity.
But he did use the principle of complicating the B
plot by intrusion from another plot in the device of the
misdirected letters entrusted to Costard, the rustic comic
in the C plot. Although the device effecting this inter
action was a crude one, multi-level action was achieved.
For the concept of the parodying subplot he was indebted
166
to Lyly, but for the clever reversals within it he was
probably indebted to no one but himself and his own
ingenuity. In the Armado-Jaquenetta-Costard triangle we
can see the plan for later parodying subplots. Although
Holofernes and Nathaniel are not so successfully employed,
they participate in an activity which reaches its zenith
in the play-within-a-play section of the C plot in A Mid
summer Night*s Dream.
The structural problem in Love*s Labour * s Lost is not
so much with the C plot as it is with the B, or main,
plot. The playwright does not yet transfer what he has
learned from classical comedy to a play of his own con
triving. He does not seem particularly adept at compli
cating a story of his own devising. He seems to need a
play, a story, or several stories, already cast, to
manipulate to suit his dramatic intentions and theme. He
as yet cannot create out of whole cloth without producing
a rather flimsy garment. He has tried to arrange his
incidents as Plautus had shown him could be done so that
suspense is built up toward a climactic action which is
followed by a swiftly executed, but not hastily contrived,
resolution. But in Love * s Labour1s Lost he fails to
achieve this sense of pace: there is very little dramatic
suspense and a deus ex machina instead of a functional
resolution. He strings his incidents together loosely
and has to summon help surreptitiously in the form of
167
Mercade to extricate himself from a dramatic impasse.
Somehow he will have to contrive a way by which the Mer
cedes are built into the play long before they are needed
so that their appearance to resolve the complications will
seem to be a plausible and even an inevitable occurrence,
one which the audience can take intellectual delight in
anticipating.
Up to this point, Shakespeare had successfully
adapted a classical comedy and written a play of his own
out of topical material and a popular courtly theme. Next
he turned to an already existent story, discarded its
dramatic irrelevancies, heightened its effect by selection
and emphasis, and combined elements from other sources to
add complexity to the plot and to fit the story to the
requirements of his theme. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
was the first comedy in which he employed this technique.
Adapting a long, rambling piece of narrative fiction to
the comic stage proved to be a much more formidable task
than simply reworking an old comedy or concocting a bit
of verbal fluff about the conflict between Love and
Learning. He did not have the stagecraft of Plautus nor
the artifice of Lyly to help him here. All he had was the
leisurely action of a Spanish pastoral, the lessons he
had learned from previous efforts, and his own ingenuity.
He had to select, omit, emphasize, and combine all on his
own. Although he did not fully succeed, he did add to
168
his grasp of structure in the process. He learned to take
a loose narrative and turn it into a complicated B plot
full of intrigue and ironic reversals. He even learned
how to build up complications of his own devising to a
suspenseful climactic reversal.
But he still had not made much progress with motiva
tion. Neither Plautus nor Lyly had been of much assistance
here. Not yet being able to motivate through the agency
of characterization, and eschewing the too overt use of
circumstance and accident, he relied heavily on moving his
characters like pieces on a chessboard, putting them where
he needed them to complicate the action, to engage in
intrigue, or to bring about the resolution. To compen
sate for the shortcomings of this method, he experimented
with three-dimensional characterization. Following the
tack he had briefly pursued with Luciana in The Comedy of
Errors, he worked on the characterization of Julia. The
amazing thing about it is that he succeeded so well and
yet still failed to use what he had achieved for motiva
tional purposes. The importance of the achievement in
three-dimensional characterization, however, overshadows
his failure to exploit it fully. The device was there to
be used and perfected in subsequent efforts.
In his effort to arrange the events in the B plot and
to strengthen characterization techniques he temporarily
ignored the principle of multi-level action which he had
169
worked on in Love’s Labour’s Lost and reverted to the
linear formula of The Comedy of Errors. Launce and Speed
are cleverer and more entertaining than the two Dromios,
but they do not participate in any more-C plot than did
these predecessors and in considerably less of a plot
than did Costard, Armado, and Jaquenetta. They are still
appended to the main plot as servants and are shackled
by this relationship and by the playwright’s preoccupation
with other matters.
In his concern with complicating the B plot, he even
neglected his earlier device of the tonally contrasting
A plot. He carelessly incorporated what might have been
an enveloping action involving the fathers of Valentine
and Proteus into his exposition and thereby lost any func
tion that he might have put it to in balancing his tones
and establishing a point of reference for the action in
his B plot. In order to go two steps forward in the B
plot, the novice was forced to retrench in other areas to
the detriment of the play considered in its entirety, but
to the advantage of his developing skill as a complicator
of plots and a creator of character. But such retrench
ments are not true defeats; they are simply necessary
mistakes in the course of a difficult apprenticeship.
Shakespeare cannot use all of his skills to best advantage
yet, but he is learning his trade and will soon have the
craft completely mastered. Once this is done, he will
170
/
know exactly how to use all the different elements.
There is still another large area of weakness left
in his technique: he still does not know much about
atmosphere or dramatic climate as an influencing factor
in structure. In The Two Gentlemen he had embarked on
his efforts under the wrong atmospheric conditions. He
had chosen the apparently amenable atmosphere of Renais
sance romance, but it had proved refractory. Under its
influence, dramatic logic wilted, and characters swooned
in its languid breezes. Unfortunately, this influence
hurt his most viable characters and destroyed their
potential usefulness. At this impasse, he knew he must
find an atmosphere more congenial to the blend of romance
and comedy than that provided by the forest of Milan.
Although he did not have the appropriate motivating
atmosphere here, he did have the germ of the D plot,
something he had shown no signs of creating earlier. The
outlaws were only puny participants in an undeveloped
D.plot, but they provided the blocking force needed to
bring about the resolution of the complications in the
B plot.
It was not until he worked his way through the pre
ceding plays and had become aware of the problem of
combining all the separate skills he had mastered that
he embodied in one effort all that he has learned about
tonal contrast, multi-level plot, functional
171
characterization, and motivating atmosphere. He was
now ready to put into practice the complete pattern of
romantic comedy that he had evolved by experimentation
with the assorted materials of Roman farce, court comedy,
and Renaissance romance. He was now ready to attempt a
romantic comedy built around the multi-level plot with
the interlocked and coterminous A-B-C-D plots which com
plicate and resolve one another and produce a single,
harmonious effect by the combining of balancing and con
trasting elements of tone, character, and incident. He
had learned how to combine tones ranging from the senti
mental to the farcical. He no longer had to rely on mere
chance and motivating circumstance outside the plot to
provide impetus for the complications and intrigues of
comic conflict: he can create character that is capable
of propelling the action forward with a minimum of circum
stantial intervention, and he can summon up atmosphere with
the magic of his poetry which will help toward the same
end. But all of this he owes to his comparative ’ ’ failures”
or, perhaps more accurately, limited successes in comic
drama.
But the last play in this study is by no means a
limited success; on the contrary, by the structural cri
teria established here, it is an unqualified triumph.
The plot structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is intri
cately multi-level, having four different elements: a
172
serious, enveloping action; a romantic but comic one; a
tonally contrasting, anti-romantic parody; and a compli
cating and resolving one which lends a motivating atmos
phere of enchantment to the internal action through the
agency of magical instruments.
Although the first printing of this play did not take
place until 1600, when the First Quarto appeared, there is
little doubt that the play was written at least five years
earlier and no doubt that it was written before 1598 since
Meres mentions it in his list. It is almost universally
agreed that it was composed to celebrate some important
wedding of the Elizabethan nobility. The Theseus-Hippolyta
nuptials as the framework and limiting agency of the play
and the elaborate masque-like use of song and dance strongly
indicate such a possibility. Obvious compliments to the
Queen in Oberon’s ’ ’ mermaid on a dolphin” speech would sug
gest that Elizabeth may have been present at the first
showing. The most acceptable event to fit such a des
cription would be the wedding of the Earl of Derby to
Elizabeth Vere at the court in Greenwich in January 1595.^
Other bits of evidence such as Titania's speech on the
inclement weather caused by 0beronfs distemper and the
Athenian mechanicals fear of "affrighting the ladies" with
too fierce an impersonation of a lion tend to support
^Neilson and Hill, p. 88.
173
this event and date. Such a likelihood as this 1595 date
would fit in exactly with the dating of the play by struc
tural surmises. A date such as January 1595 would place
this play later than all three of the other comedies con
sidered here, a supposition which is certainly indisputable
on technical grounds, assuming this play did not undergo
extensive revision later, a possibility which is generally
not much credited.
The composite structure of the play is Shakespeare's
own creation although most of the individual elements
within it come from other sources. The idea for the
opening situation of the play may have come from the first
twelve lines or so of Chaucer's Knight's Tale. The
character of Theseus may have been expanded by suggestions
from Plutarch's treatment of him and Romulus. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, probably through Golding's English trans
lation in fourteeners, was the main source for the tale
of the tragic lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe. The suggestion
for the use of the Fairies may have come from previous
plays such as James the Fourth by Greene, in which Oberon,
King of the Fairies, appears. Folklore also played a part
in their creation, especially in the case of Robin Good-
fellow, whom Shakespeare named "Puck.” The use of the
Fairies and Midsummer's Day as part of the setting per
mitted the playwright to incorporate fantasy and magic
into the structure of the play. Shakespeare even borrowed
174
from himself: Bottom and his fellow actors trace their
ancestry to Costard and the other Worthies of Love * s
Labour * s Lost; the pairs of lovers are clearly related to
those of the Two Gentlemen; and the farcical horse-play
harks back to squabbles in The Comedy of Errors.
The most important borrowing from himself, however,
occurs in the numerous structural devices developed in
earlier plays which he employs here in a completely
coordinated A-B-C-D multi-level structure. The characters
and central incident of the enveloping action (the A
plot), involving the impending nuptials of Theseus and
Hippolyta, serve as the occasion for the introduction and
exposition of the conflicts in the B plot revolving around
the perversities of affection which are resolved eventually
into two reciprocal loves. The first complication in the
main action of Plot B occurs through the intervention of
the main mover in Plot A, Duke Theseus, in the affairs
of the Athenian lovers. The senex, Egeus, acts as the
link between plots A and B where he serves as a blocking
force to set up the basic conflict and then later acts as
the endorser of the incorporation of Plot B into A fol
lowing the resolution of the former.
When the four young people first appear on the stage,
a situation of perverse affection already exists. For
some reason outside the purview of the plot proper,
Demetrius, who had earlier loved Helena, has transferred
175
his love to Hermia who is already loved by Lysander and
who reciprocates his love.
Lys. I am beloved of beauteous Hermia.
Why should not I then prosecute my right?
Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
And won her soul, and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry.
Upon this spotted and inconstant man. (I.i.104-110)
Helen then, although forsaken, still loves Demetrius and
wishes to win back his affection, but the blocking force,
Egeus, stands in the way of this possibility because he
has successfully petitioned the Duke to authorize the
marriage of Demetrius to his daughter, Hermia.
The. For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father’s will,
Or else the law of Athens yields you up—
Which by no means we may extenuate—
To death, or to a vow of single life. (I.i.116-121)
This first internal complication in the B plot leads to
triple intrigue just as the journey of Proteus to Milan
led to a triple intrigue in The Two Gentlemen. Here it
starts with Lysander's and Hermia's intrigue against
society in their deciding to steal away to the wood that
night to escape the edict of Duke Theseus. Helena, who
is informed of the proposed flight in her role as friend
and confidante to Hermia, intrigues against friendship
by informing Demetrius of their plans. She engages in
a further intrigue, this time against love, by chasing
after Demetrius who is in pursuit of Lysander and Hermia.
This complication and intrigue in Plot B, which was
176
initiated by action in Plot A, takes the characters of
Plot B into the moon-bathed woods of Athens supervised by
Oberon acting through Puck and the magical flowers, the
main agents of Plot D, along with Titania.
Next, the characters and situation of Plot C, the
Athenian mechanicals and their crude theatrical, are
brought into the structure. Unlike the Dromios and the
clowns of The Two Gentlemen, they are not mere appendages
of the participants in either Plot A or B; their only
connection with them is an indirect one in their role of
citizens of Athens. Being thus emancipated socially,
they are equally emancipated dramatically and therefore
can carry on their own separate activities. These activi
ties, centering around their rehearsal in the woods, form
part of a complication converging on a conflict in Plot D.
When that amiable ass, Bottom, becomes literally converted
into an ass by the magic of the woods, he, in conjunction
with the love-in-idleness flower helps to resolve the
comic conflict between Oberon and Titania when the former
takes pity on his poor queen for being enamoured of such
an ass.
The initial movement of the characters in the C, or
parody, plot takes them to the woods to rehearse the
production of their amateur theatrical. This movement
brings them into contact with the sphere of activity of
the participants in Plot D. While in the woods, Bottom
177
and his colleagues still remain independent of the parti
cipants in Plot B and A until after the resolution of the
conflict in B and its incorporation into the A plot. The
events of Plot C are not linearly connected with those of
Plot B at this time, but are coterminous with them, a
device useful for the creation of suspense since it permits
the playwright to suspend immediate audience satisfaction
by moving from one level of action to another.
The participants and situation in Plot D form a
vortex toward which the lines of action of Plots B and G
converge. Titania’s doting on the little Indian boy
operates as the pre-existing motive circumstance which
provides the basis for Oberon’s action. By his intrigue
against Titania he is drawn into intervention in the
affairs of Plot B. Actually, from a structural stand
point, his intervention in Plot B is the reason for his
presence in the play, but Shakespeare has now learned
how to convert a necessity into a virtue. Oberon is
a resolving agent, like the outlaws and Mercade were, but
he is not used inexpertly as they were. The playwright
uses him not only to resolve the B plot but also in a plot
of his own which is amusing in its own right and which
heightens the amusement in the C plot. This device,
simple on the surface, of a Fairy King at odds with his
queen and seeking to resolve his conflict, but in the
process creating and resolving complications in other
178
plots is a master-stroke of dramatic invention. Lesser
efforts in the use of resolving agents that went before
culminate in this one brilliant flourish, one which the
playwright continues to use to the very end of his career
in the actions of Ariel seeking to gain his freedom and,
by so doing, affecting the action of the C plot of Cali
ban, Stephano, and Trinculo and that of the B plot
involving Ferdinand and Miranda.
This search on the part of Oberon for a solution to
the conflict in Plot D leads to the second complication in
Plot B. When Puck squeezes his magic juice on the eyes
of Lysander, who awakens to be smitten by Helena, we get
a "quadrangular duel of perverse affection."-* Lysander
is now in love with Helena; Helena is still in love with
Demetrius; Demetrius with Hermia; and Hermia with Lysan
der. Each person is in love with exactly the wrong one
from the standpoint of the loved one. What complicates
the comic incongruity is the second reversal of intention
that Oberon suffers. In attempting to rectify the per
verse quadrangle of love, he squeezes the potent love-juice
on the eyes of the right young Athenian, but at the wrong
time, and succeeds only in reversing the situation that
prevailed when the lovers first entered the wood. Instead
of both young men pursuing Hermia in loving adoration
^Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare, p. 229.
179
as they did when they entered the magic forest, they are
now both pursuing Helena, and it is Hermia who is the for
lorn one. This reversal of roles on the part of the two
young ladies leads to comedy on the farcical level when
the skeptical Helena accuses them all of mockery and turns
upon her friend from childhood who, in Helena's distressed
mind, has changed her identity from friend to foe.
Hel. Lo, she is one of this confederacy!
Now I have perceived they have conjoin'd all three
To fashion this false sport, in spite of me.
Injurious Hermia! Most ungrateful maid!
Have you conspired, have you with these contrived
To bait me with this foul derision? (III.ii.192-197)
The broad comedy of vituperation and the pulling of hair
results with the polite young ladies changing into brawling
fishwives.
Hel. Oh, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
SVie was a vixen when she went to school,
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
Her. Little again! Nothing but low and little!
Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?
Let me come to her. (Ill.ii.322-328)
In the meantime, Plot C becomes entangled with Plot D
when the rude mechanicals remove themselves to the Athenian
wood to rehearse their "lamentable comedy" under the direc
tion of the pacific Quince and with the indispensable
services of the versatile Bottom, that master in the art
of changes of identity. He can assume any identity
required but paradoxically remains his own inimitable self
throughout. The presence of this ass among men in the
Athenian wood is sufficient to suggest immediately to
Puck the solution of the conflict between Oberon and
Titania: transfer her affection from the little Indian
boy Oberon covets to this very opposite of a desirable
love object for a fairy queen and the conflict is resolved.
The only difficulty is that it comes off too successfully;
the irrepressible Bottom accepts it with too much aplomb.
He is constitutionally incapable of being nonplussed. Not
even Oberon, the one who has profited directly from this
incongruous infatuation, can permit such a union as that
between the delicate Queen of Fairyland and the Prince of
Asses, Master Nick Bottom. Bottom, with his literal
minded triumph over all the hazards of fate, is too much
to inflict on Titania. Thus, by virtue of being what he
is, that is, through characterization, Bottom becomes the
resolving agent for Plot D and restores amity between
Oberon and Titania; out of pity Oberon must release her
from her dotage to this incredible ass and reconcile
himself to her.
The D plot has been resolved, but the B plot is still
in a state of chaos. With Demetrius and Lysander both
having undergone a reversal of roles into lovers of Helena
and the friendship between the two girls ruptured, things
have gone as far as they can without undergoing repetitious
complications and comically flat reversals. Things have
come to an impasse and must now be resolved. Just as the
D plot with its motivating atmosphere and magical agencies
181
complicated the action of Plot B and turned things topsy
turvy, it must now set them right as was originally planned
by Oberon before he suffered his reversals of intention.
All that needs to be done to set them right is to disen
chant the right young man. This is accomplished by the
dropping of the juice of Dian’s bud into Lysander*s eye
before he awakens and sees Hermia. Once done, the situa
tion of quadrangular perversity in love is converted into
one of harmony with two pairs of lovers and a four-way
friendship.
The B plot is now ready for incorporation in the A
plot: this is accomplished by bringing a hunting party
composed of the characters in the A plot into the wood at
daybreak, a time when the spell of enchantment has dis
appeared. When Theseus finds the lovers have solved their
dilemma themselves, he pronounces the ritual of incor
poration,
Fair lovers, you are fortunately met.
Of this discourse we more will hear anon.
Egeus, I will overbear your will,
For in the temple, by and by, with us
These couples shall eternally be knit.
(IV.i.181-185)
The complication in Plot C, the fact that the ama
teur theatrical group had lost its star performer, is
resolved by the solution of the conflict in Plot D between
Oberon and Titania. Once the King and Queen of the
enchanted wood are reconciled, the garment of magic is
182
removed from the shoulders of mortals and Bnfctom returns..
to the world of figurative asses so befuddled by the
memory of his "translation” that he can only philosophize,
I have had a most rare vision, I have had a dream past
the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an
ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I
was— there is no man can tell what. Methought I was--
and methought I had— but man is but a patched fool if he
will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man
hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's
hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor
his heart to report, what my dream was. (IV.i.209-218)
Bottom is triumphant to the end; he knows the limitations
of human intellect and sense perception and he is not
going to make the mistake of trying to transcend them.
Magic may change what appears above his shoulders, but he
is a creature of solid instinct to his very bottom.
All that remains for the incorporation of the resolved
G plot into the A-B complex is to permit them to come into
contact. With the coming of the dawn, the symbolic end of
the rule of fantasy and magic, events move back into the
world of commonsense and law and order, the world of
Theseus, where things do not change their identities
momentarily and where one can predict human behavior. Now
that the initial complication arising outside the play
that had caused the original triangle of perverse affection
has been resolved by contact of the world of irrational
human passion with the world of fancy and imagination, no
true conflict exists any longer. Passage through the
world of imagination and poetic fancy has converted
183
irrational passion into controlled desire so that it can
now be admitted to the world of reason and common sense.
The eyes of sane judgment as exemplified by Theseus can
recognize this transformation and realize that the estab
lished order is no longer threatened by passion that runs
riot, knowing no restraint of custom or of reason. Egeus
would cling to his ritualistic objections, but now his
remonstrances are no longer worthy of serious attention
and instead would become ludicrous if he persisted in
them. Common sense is now on the side of the lovers, and
Egeus is silenced by the logic of events. There are no
longer any obstacles to the course of true love; they
have been removed by the magic hand of imagination, and
their removal has been attested to by the guardian of
reason, Duke Theseus.
The conjoined A-B society temporarily resists the
inclusion of the participants of plot C into its newly
unified structure. But through the tolerance of the
prime mover of plot A, who has already accepted the parti
cipants of plot B (the representatives of the role of
passion in human life), the participants of plot C (the
representatives of the role of instinct in human life),
are also accepted,
The. I will hear that play,
For never anything can be amiss,
When simpleness and duty tender it.
(V.i.81-83)
184
Thus along with reason and controlled passion in the life
of man, we have the necessity of "simpleness” or instinct
recognized. A balanced society now exists, composed of
the reconciled contrasts between reason and passion and
the rescinded exclusion of instinct. The influence of
fantasy and imagination hovers in the background, but its
effect is beneficent when reason is in charge of the other
levels of human nature. Reason is immune to the disrup
tive influence of fantasy; human passion, under the
aegis of reason, can work its way through to controlled
desire; and earth-bound instinct will paradoxically rise
above the highest flights of fantasy in the literal minded
triumph of Bottom over magic.
In terms of structure, plot D is not incorporated
into the A-B-G complex but remains as a distinct entity.
It does, however, take its farewell in the form of a song
and dance, the agents of its power that are left behind in
the world of common sense, controlled passion, and instinct
as reminders of its potential influence in human affairs.
Thus, it can be seen how the playwright has learned
to incorporate meaning into structure. He no longer
needs to rely on such artificial themes as Love versus
Learning or Love versus Friendship, engrafted on a plot
and determining its actions to the detriment of structure,
in order to convey meaning. Nor does he have to employ
explicit statements of his theme through the use of a
185
spokesman in the play to express his reflections on life.
The meaning of the play now rises out of its structure.
But the total impact is not merely an intellectual one;
the insight goes deeper than that, involving a total
response on the part of the audience— calling on intel
lect, emotion, instinct, and fancy. With such a structure
the meaning of comedy approaches the profundity of tragedy.
Its levity is profundity in another direction; it simply
involves a different view of life based on the recognition
of compromise in human affairs, something which the tragic
protagonist refuses to admit into his scheme of things.
This study was undertaken with the hope that it
might provide the researcher with a greater degree of
insight into Shakespeare's methods and dramatic develop
ment in the writing of comedy than he originally possessed.
It was hoped that the study might lead to a better under
standing of the mechanics of the plays--why certain things
were done at a certain time, why characters were drawn
as they were, and why the particular setting was chosen.
It was further hoped that the study might provide criteria
to determine how effectively Shakespeare had combined the
dramatic elements he was employing--where he had fallen
short, and where he had hit the mark. Finally, the
researcher hoped that it might illuminate the way in which
structure could be used to shape meaning, how Shakespeare
expressed his view of the world through the incidents,
186
characters, and tone he created and the attitude he demon
strated toward them.
The major conclusion arrived at from this inquiry is
that Shakespeare, by means of a multi-level, tonally
contrasting A-B-C-D structure, which he created out of
elements borrowed mainly from others, devised an effective
dramatic means of combining high entertainment with deep
insight into the human condition, a goal in art held in
the highest esteem since classical antiquity. Through
the use of this method he captured the spirit of classical
art without resorting to the formalism appropriate to
another age but not to his own day. This study would
suggest that his genius lies not alone in his poetry,
great as it is, but in this development of a comic struc
ture suited not only to the tastes of an Elizabethan
audience but also to the tastes of all who look for unity
in diversity and entertainment coupled with insight in a
work of art.
LIST OF WORKS CITED
Baker, George. The Development of Shakespeare as a
Dramatist. New York, 1923.
Baldwin, T. W. William Shakesperers Five-Act Structure.
Urbana, 1947.
Bergson, Henri. ’ ’ Laughter." In Wylie Sypher, ed. , Comedy.
New York, 1956.
Boas, Frederick S. Shakespeare and his Predecessors.
New York, 1905.
Bradbrook, Muriel. The Growth and Structure of Eliza
bethan Comedy. London, 1955.
Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare. London, 1957.
Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare. London, 1924.
Charlton, H. B. Shakespearian Comedy. New York, 1938.
Clark, Eva Turner. The Satirical Comedy "Love’s Labour's
Lost. " New YorlTJ 1933 .
Craig, Hardin. An Interpretation of Shakespeare. New
York, 1948.
Frye, Northrup. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton,
1959.
Goddard, H. C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Chicago,
1951.
Hughes, Leo. A Century of English Farce. Princeton, 1956.
Lyly, John. The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W.
Bond. II vols. Oxford, 1962.
Meader, William. Courtship in Shakespeare. New York,
1954.
187
188
Moulton, Richard G. The Moral System of Shakespeare.
New York, 1907.
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sources. London, 1957.
Myers, Henry A. Tragedy: A View of Life. Ithaca, 1956.
Nicoll, Allardyce. Shakespeare: An Introduction. New
York, 1952.
Pollard, A. W. Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates.
Cambridge, 1920.
Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Wilbur
Cross and Tucker Brooke. New Haven, T92 5.
_______ . Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch and John Dover Wilson. Cambridge, 1923.
_______ . The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakes
peare, ed. William Allen Neilson and Charles Jarvis
Hill. Cambridge, 1942.
Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It
Tells Us. Cambridge, 1935.
Thomas, Sidney. ’ ’ The Date of The Comedy of Errors, ”
Shakespeare Quarterly, Autumn, 1956, pp. 376-384.
Yates, Frances A. A Study of "Love's Labour’s Lost.”
Cambridge, 193(T!

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The Evolution Of The Humours Character In Seventeenth-Century English Comedy

PDF

The Concept Of The 'Mystical Body Of Christ' In Selected Poems By Gerard Manley Hopkins

PDF

The Novels Of Joyce Cary In Relation To His Critical Writings

PDF

William Faulkner'S "Absalom, Absalom!": An Exercise In Affirmation

PDF

'Disorderly Order' In The Garden Literature Of Browne, Marvell, And Milton

PDF

A Critical Edition Of Thomas Heywood'S 'The Wise Woman Of Hogsdon' With Introduction And Notes

PDF

Theological And Dramatic Concepts Of The End Of Man In The Middle Ages

PDF

An Analysis Of Antithesis As A Basis Of Epic Rhetorical Patterns

PDF

Studies In The Influence Of The 'Commedia Dell'Arte' On English Drama: 1605-1800

PDF

The Religious Language Of Thomas Traherne'S 'Centuries'

PDF

William Blake'S Apocalypse: A Theo-Psychological Interpretation

PDF

Mexico, Modern Literature, And The Search For Soul

PDF

The Dramatic Function Of Comic Elements In Three Shakespearean Love Tragedies

PDF

A Pedagogical Model Of Discourse Structure

PDF

The 'Quomodo' Manuscript: Historical Introduction, Translation, And Critical Apparatus

PDF

Variant Forms Of English And Scottish Popular Ballads In America

PDF

The Literary Kinship Of Leo N. Tolstoy And Romain Rolland: A Comparativestudy Of The Epic Dimensions Of 'War And Peace' And 'Jean-Christophe'

PDF

G. W. Leibniz' 'Collectanea Etymologica': Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte Deretymologie' (German Text)

PDF

Opinions Of Beginning High School Business Teachers Regarding Their College Preparation For Teaching

PDF

The Portrayal Of The Jew In American Drama Since 1920

Asset Metadata

Creator Bonazza, Blaze Odell (author)

Core Title A Structural Analysis Of Shakespeare'S Early Comedies

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, English,Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest,Theater

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Arnold, Aerol (committee chair), Kurth, Burton (committee member), O'Neil, Edward N. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-241754

Unique identifier UC11358027

Identifier 6103812.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-241754 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6103812.pdf

Dmrecord 241754

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Bonazza, Blaze Odell

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA