Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love

Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt

Ed. By Karen Bamford and Ric Knoweles

University of Toronto Press Inc. 2008

The essays collected in the volume are written in honour of a distinguished

Shakesperean scholar Alexander Leggatt who made considerable contribution
into studying and understanding Shakespeare’s love comedies which were often
unjustly disregarded by serious critics of the XXth century. The authors of the
volume successfully continue the conversation about Shakespeare’s comedies
demonstrating new possibilities of their reading. The essays presented cover a
wide range of approaches to Shakespeare’s love plays which are quite diverse and
insightful.

The collection opens with a comprehensive introduction; written by one of

the editors of the volume Karen Bamford which gives a synopsis of all essays
included outlining the general logistics of the issue. It should be noted from the
very beginning that the book is very logically structured – it has three parts: the
first features the context for Shakespeare’s comedies of love, the second –
focuses on Shakespeare’s plays as such, and the third presents performance
based criticism reconstructing some most innovative and imaginative productions
of Shakespeare’s comedies. All this allows to rate this collection as highly
professional and efficient in terms of its scholarly contribution into Shakespeare’s
studies. It is only natural that certain things provoke questions or counter
arguments.

The first section comprises three essays. In her paper ‘The Comedy of Love
and the London Lord Mayor’ Show’ Anne Lancashire gives a vivid account of the
theatre spectacle presented annually for the new lord mayor of London. Being
very interesting by itself from historical perspective it does not seem to have
much connection to Shakespeare, giving however a general background of the
theatre life of his time. As for Philip D. Collington’s ‘A “Pennyworth” of Marital
Advice: Bachelors and Ballad Culture in Much Ado about Nothing ‘ it provides a
fresh network of cultural references for the play giving analysis of popular English
ballads of the time definitely adding new levels of meaning and implications
which otherwise may escape modern readers and spectators. A very interesting
material is introduced by Katherine West Scheil in her ‘Shakespeare’s Comedies
and American Club Women’. She shows how Shakespeare’s comedies helped
nineteenth-century American women to bring about the debates about gender
roles and such taboo topics as female sexuality and the like.

The second part is the largest in the volume as it presents different critical
approaches to Shakespeare’s comedies. It demonstrates a great variety of angels
under which the immortal plays can be considered and reconsidered. Thus in
‘“Five thousand year a boy”: Love as Arrested Development’ John H. Astington
shows the provocative function of Cupid-like characters – Moth, Cesario,
Ganymede (I would probably add Puck). The author arrives at an interesting
conclusion that ‘The boy as an object of love, a player in love’s game is a further
displacement, and sophistication, of an ancient icon. He remains invested with
the uncertainties and ambiguities of his original, and as represented by Cesario
and Ganymede as thoroughly a theatrical creation as Benvolio’s Cupid, if of far
richer theatrical meaning and consequence’. (79)

David Bevington in his ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost and Won’ on the contrary
focuses on the adult male characters convincingly tracing their development from
immature anxieties of ‘hesitant wooings’ to ‘full manhood’ showing the guiding
role of young heroines in this process, who are often idealized. He finds the
culmination of this motif in the courtship of Henry and Kate in ‘Henry V’, though I
would argue that history plays should not be discussed together with comedies
without any differentiation - the thing quite often done in this volume. This is
exactly what happens in the following essay – ‘Affecting Desire in Shakespeare’s
Comedies of Love’ by Paul Budra. The author justly points out that effective
seduction in Shakespeare’s theatre occurs only in history plays, giving examples
from ‘Henry VI’, ‘Henry VIII’ and ‘Richard III’, while young characters of his
comedies fall in love and marry but ‘they are not allowed to mechanically affect
desire in each other, to push each other’s desire button. That technique is the
province of villains...’(107). He gives an interesting digression into Elizabethan
popular culture where comedies in public theatre were basically associated with
lust, while Shakespeare’s goal must have been different. As Budra comments,
‘These plays contain many erotic complexities but that eroticism is independent
of the desire affected by the techniques of seduction.’(107) I would only add that
the world of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies is organized according to the laws
different from his other plays – it is the world of Renaissance utopian humanism
where eventually Jack will always have Jill without using any artificial techniques.
 In ‘A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Alan L.Ackerman
draws unexpected but convincing parallels between Shakespeare’s comedy and
Plato’s The Symposium which could have partially been the source of certain basic
themes and motifs of the play such as ‘relations between old and young, of
parents and offspring both biological and philosophical, of love and knowledge, of
passion and reason, of homogeneity and distinction, of the commensurable and
the infinite, of pedagogy and generosity’(113). All these issues are carefully
explored by the critic in the play.

Not willing to diminish the quality of the other essays I find Susan Westfall’s
‘Love in the Contact Zone: Gender, Culture and Race in The Merchant of Venice’ a
most insightful and prolific study of Shakespeare’s most ‘uncomfortable’ play.
Borrowing Mary Louise Patt’s notion of ‘contact zones’, areas where cultures
meet to negotiate power and to express, in rhetorical structures, the various
tensions that inform relationships between genders, generations, religions and
ethnicities, the author shows how ‘seventeenth-century concerns about
miscegenation, feminism and homoeroticism continue to preoccupy performers
and audiences today’(127). Combining the tools of modern criticism with
historical approach she gives deep analysis of all complexities and ambiguities
inherent in the play, also referring to the means different directors and actors
used to solve them. Such an approach helps to avoid a straightforward
interpretation showing how ‘the various contact zones represented in the play
form a mobile and diverse kinship system, in which a character may belong to
many families’(151).

In ‘The Unity of Twelfth Night’ Arthur F. Kinney successfully manages to

reconcile traditional tendency of old criticism to find structural and ideological
unity in the play and postmodern assumptions of multiplicity and diversity of any
work of art by showing that the twinning of Viola and Sebastian suggests the
paradigm of the whole play with its ‘growing division between the inner sense of
things and the outer portrayal of them, much as the revels of Twelfth Night
anticipate the revelation that will follow’(164) thus proving that the old and the
new critical approaches are not altogether incompatible.

Alan Somerset in his deep and interesting article ‘The Baby in the Handbag:
“Family Matters” in Shakespeare’ traces the development of family reunion motif
from the first comedies up to the romances of the late period. Actually the
utmost attention is paid to the latter and the author justly proves that here this
motif acquires a more powerful significance. What I personally object to is
complete ignoring of the change of the genre structure which actually occurs
already in the so-called “problem plays” and definitely influences the treatment
of the motifs recurrent in all of Shakespeare’s plays, this one including, reflecting
the general change in his world outlook.

In the last section we find essays devoted to most interesting theatre

productions of Shakespeare’s comedies: R.B. Parker’s ‘“Songs of Apollo”: Love’s
Labour’s Lost in 1961”, C.G. McGee’s ‘Smitten: Staging Love at First Sight at
Stratford Festival’, G.B.Shand’s ‘Romancing The Shrew: Recuperating a Comedy of
Love’. No wonder, two of the essays focus on the Merchant of Venice – Jill L.
Levenson’s ‘Love in a Naughty World: Modern Dramatic Adaptations of The
Merchant of Venice’ and Helen Ostovich’s ‘Staging the Jew: Playing with the Text
of The Merchant of Venice’ - showing the ways modern directors deal with the
“uncomfortable” subject. All the essays carefully reconstruct the productions
taking into account all the details of staging and interpretation both by directors
and actors so that the readers feel as spectators watching the show. The most
vivid and colorful of all is probably R.B. Parker’s ‘”Songs of Apollo”: Love’s
Labour’s Lost in1961” which also contains references to other productions of this
“unscenic” play.

So, by way of conclusion it can be said that we are presented with a quite
prominent collection of critical essays which although not being a completely
illuminating rediscovery of Shakespeare is definitely another proof that ‘the
conversation about Shakespeare’s comedies of love is never over and that each
successive generation of readers will have much to say about them’(XXIV).