Coming of Age in Shakespeare

Marjorie Garber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138150249
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135201401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marjorie Garber examines the rites of passage and maturation patterns--"coming of age"--in Shakespeare's plays. Citing examples from virtually the entire Shakespeare canon, she pays particular attention to the way his characters grow and change at points of personal crisis. Among the crises Garber discusses are: separation from parent or sibling in preparation for sexual love and the choice of husband or wife; the use of names and nicknames as a sign of individual exploits or status; virginity, sexual initiation and the acceptance of sexual maturity, childbearing and parenthood; and, finally, attitudes toward death and dying.

1

Introduction

‘Thy Passages of Life’

Jaques’ celebrated observations on the seven ages of man in As You Like It (II. vii. 138–65) reflect a philosophical and iconographie tradition that had its roots in antiquity and was still flourishing in Shakespeare’s time. The true number of the ages was in dispute, since learned authorities had espoused a number of figures. Aristotle, for example, divided man’s life span into three, Pythagoras, Horace and Ovid four, Marcus Varro five, Avicenna and St Augustine six, and Ptolemy and Hippocrates seven; virtually no number from three to twelve was without its proponents.¹ Seven, the magic number associated not only with the ages but also with the planets, the liberal arts, the virtues and the deadly sins, was a popular choice, and Jaques’ seven ages have a certain pedantic quality not unsuited to his temperament. But what is more interesting from our point of view than the number of ages he describes is the way he elects to describe them.

The infant mewls and pukes in his nurse’s arms, the boy creeps reluctantly to school, the lover (like Orlando) pens bad poems to his mistress’s eyebrow. All these are what we might call typical activities for the ages they characterize, of the same genre as those pictorial representations of boys spinning tops, young men hawking, and old men playing backgammon which were frequently to be seen in frescoes, stained-glass windows, and engravings. The soldier, justice and pantaloon, however, are not really engaged in actions at all; instead they are described in terms of their physical appearance, and especially of their language. The soldier is bearded and ‘full of strange oaths’ (149), the plump justice speaks in ‘wise saws and modern instances’ (155), the pantaloon, dwarfed by his clothing, finds his ‘big manly voice / Turning again toward childish treble’ (160–1). A glance back at the earlier ‘ages’ will reveal that this characterization in terms of utterance is a constant element throughout the passage: the ‘mewling’ infant, the ‘whining’ schoolboy and the ‘sighing’ lover will speak, and illustrate their stages of life as they do so. Jaques’ set piece, in other words, is not only a conventional listing of types and vignettes, but also a unified portrait of human development, taking speech as a common characteristic from childhood to senility. When we look more closely at the tradition of the ages of man, the presence of such a pattern appears increasingly significant.

In many cases the ages were combined with such other sequences as the pilgrimage or voyage of life, the wheel of fortune, or the passage of the months – each a temporal progression accompanied by changes in the fortunes and actions of the central figures. Thus January might depict children playing; June, a wedding; November, illness; and December, death. A painting dated 1533 by Dürer’s assistant, Hans Schaufelein – which has been in England since Tudor times, and is now at Chatsworth – shows four figures ranged along the circumference of Fortune’s wheel, each representing a different age.² A beardless youth sits at the base, and is succeeded halfway up the wheel by an elegant young gentleman with a stylishly trimmed beard, wearing a brimmed hat. At the apex of the wheel sits a man in early middle age, wearing a full beard and a king’s crown, and to his right, descending, is a patriarchal figure in flowing robes and beard, who seems to be tumbling toward the bottom of the frame. Similarities in dress, feature and carriage strongly suggest that the painting depicts the same man at four stages – or ages – of his career, with earthly success conjoined with maturity at the height, and the inevitability of loss and change emblematized by the falling figure of the old man and the presence of the wheel itself. Another pictorial example from about the same period, attributed to Baldung Grien, is a painting (presently in Munich) of ‘The Three Ages’ designed as a diptych to balance ‘The Three Graces’.³ In fact, ‘The Three Ages’ seems to be almost a parody of the ‘Graces’, since its three principal figures are similarly linked arm in arm, but instead of three lovely women in the prime of youth we see one young woman, one woman decidedly aged (with drawn face and slightly pendulous breasts) and, in place of the third, a skeleton with a death’s head, holding an hourglass and a scythe. Even for the more robust sensibility of the time this pendant to the pleasant aesthetic cliché of the timeless graces might well give one pause; it is a work that might well have appealed to Jaques.

In a less mordant mood, Shakespeare in sonnet 7 also describes three ages, each associated with the position of the sun in the sky (first ‘new-appearing’, then ‘Resembling strong youth in his middle age’, and finally ‘weary’ and ‘reeling’ ‘like feeble age’), with a warning in the couplet that the beloved should get a son while he is in the noon of life – before his own sun sets. In these instances, as in many others, the design is at once typical and teleological; the actions of common life are joined with a version of memento mori, and the meaning of the entire sequence depends upon an acknowledgment of the transitory nature of health, wealth, fame, and power.

Sometimes, however, a further degree of unity can be found in the sequence. Just as Jaques uses speech as an index of human development, in the morality play Mundus et Infans the constant – and constantly changing – element is the protagonist’s name. At birth his mother calls him Daliance, but at the age of six the World renames him Wanton. At fourteen his name is changed to Love–Lust–Liking, and at twenty-one to Manhood. Later in life Folly will call him Shame, and finally Conscience will give him the name of Repentance.⁴

In a rudimentary way, Mundus et Infans places its emphasis upon the moment of change, rather than the subsequent perception of differences. In other words, it indicates a series of crises or turning points. Whereas other versions of the ‘ages’ theme show typical though temporary stages in a general and inexorable cycle, this play stresses the moments of transition for the individual, as his experiences in the world change him virtually into a different person.

Another example from the Tudor period may help to clarify this distinction between difference and change, and to suggest the relevance of such patterns to our understanding of maturity. As a young man, Sir Thomas More designed a ‘fyne paynted clothe’ for his father’s house which combined elements of the Trionfi of Petrarch with a representation of the traditional ages of man. These ‘nyne pageauntes’, as More describes them – for they have since been lost – included four that traced the progress from youth to age. The first panel showed a boy spinning a top – a common emblem of childhood. The second through fourth panels, however, included not one but two figures or sets of figures, and in each case the subject of the previous panel was depicted being conquered by the next. Thus the picture of the second age showed a young man on horseback, engaged in the traditional activity of hawking – but the boy of the first age lay beneath the horse’s feet. The third age proved the adolescent’s downfall, for now he was himself trodden beneath the feet of Venus and Cupid, signifying love. In the fourth age, an old man stood upon the recumbent bodies of Venus and Cupid. In each of these tableaux, the presence of the outdated or superseded figure(s) offered a vivid reminder of the struggle intrinsic to passage from one stage of human development to the next.⁵

To this point we have been speaking of literary or pictorial artifacts; More’s ‘pageauntes’ were both, since verses of his own composition accompanied each painted panel. But as we have already seen, interest in the ages of man extended beyond artists and poets to astronomers, philosophers, physicians and mathematicians – in short, to anyone concerned with the study of human nature. In its preoccupation with the planets and the seasons, the scrutiny of man’s life-span included such disciplines as astrology and even theology, while the contemplation of the wheel of fortune led scholars to history and political philosophy, and the phenomenon of physical deterioration (so explicitly chronicled by Jaques) to medicine. We should not be unduly surprised, therefore, to find the ‘new’ social sciences of our time – anthropology, psychology and sociology – engaged in a version of the same intellectual quest: to determine the fundamental patterns of human development, and in the course of doing so concentrate upon critical points for growth and change. The relationship between literature and such humanistic disciplines has always been mutually helpful. It is in the nature of new scientific advances to provide suggestive insights into old problems, and just as the hypotheses of Freud, Darwin and Marx offered provocative directions for the scholar concerned with the history and behavior of earlier periods, so the researches of the last century in the area of human relations may indicate some striking new facts about patterns of development in Shakespeare’s plays.

*

It may be useful to take account of the concept of ‘rites of passage’, a term first applied by Arnold van Gennep to the ceremonies accompanying ‘life crises’ for the individual.⁶ Drawing primarily upon the behavior patterns of semicivilized peoples, but also upon the practices of the ancient Greeks and certain Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions, van Gennep observed that there were three major phases which distinguished each of these rites: separation (séparation), transition (marge), and incorporation or reintegration (agrégation). For some social events one of these phases might be more important than another, but most frequently the three phases were found in conjunction with one another. Thus marriage, which we think of primarily as a rite of incorporation, was often at the same time a rite of separation, both from a previous family or clan and from the social group of age-mates constituted by unmarried girls (or boys). In the course of this study we will see how this combination of rites and motives will influence such Shakespearean characters as Desdemona, Cordelia and Cressida in their transition from one stage to another. Similarly death and mourning, which we might consider to be self-evidently rites of separation, frequently include rites of incorporation as well: for the deceased, incorporation with those who have died before them, and for the mourners, reintegration into normal society. Here again Shakespearean analogues are not hard to find. The last words of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Lear and Kent all indicate a wish for reunion with a loved one after death. Consider in particular Antony’s words on learning the (false) news that Cleopatra is dead: ‘I come, my queen. … Stay for me. / Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze’ (IV. xiv. 50–2). On the other hand, the final speeches of the survivors of tragedy – Horatio, Edgar, Malcolm, Octavius Caesar, Prince Escalus – all stress the need for a return to a more normal mode of life. The life of the society is altered by the tragic deaths, but cannot cease or die with the dead.

In his introductory remarks on classification of rites in Les Rites de passage van Gennep explains that

transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.⁷

If we compare this statement to Jaques’ speech, we will notice a similar list of stages (coincidentally in this case also seven), but with the important addition of an explanation for the ceremonies marking each stage. It is not the condition of being in any given stage, but rather the passage from one to the next, that is the crucial (and sometimes traumatic) time for the individual. Thus a key element in van Gennep’s schema – and in the writings of those who followed him – is the concept of the threshold separating neutral zones from those that are sacred. ‘Whoever passes from one to the other’, he explains,

finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time; he wavers between two worlds. It is this situation which I have designated a transition, and one of the purposes of this book is to demonstrate that this symbolic and spatial area of transition may be found in more or less pronounced form in all the ceremonies which accompany the passage from one social and magico-religious position to another.

The term ‘magico-religious’ may seem uncomfortably specific to anthropology, but if we pause for a moment to consider Shakespearean worlds like the Forest of Arden, the Athenian wood, Prospero’s island or the country of Bohemia, we may well discern in them a separate spatial world in which certain quasi-magical events take place: physical transformations, mysterious sleeps and wakings, apparitions, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Indeed there is no need to confine our concept of such sacred zones to the comedies and romances; the heaths in Lear and Macbeth and the fertile world of Egypt are equally set apart and equally representative of territorial (and psychological) passage. Northrop Frye calls this kind of place a ‘green world’.⁸ Alvin Kernan calls it a ‘second place’;⁹ C. L. Barber calls its time zone ‘holiday’ as distinct from ‘every day’.¹⁰ In short, van Gennep’s concept of a ‘sacred zone’ corresponds to some observations literary critics have already made about the plays. Literary and anthropological schemes agree, and lead us to very similar insights about stages in human development.

Recent work in anthropology has applied van Gennep’s concept of the threshold to both preliterate and modern societies, and extended it to secular as well as religious ritual. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has written convincingly about ‘persons in a marginal state’, ‘people who are somehow left out of the patterning of society’,¹¹ like unborn children and pubertal initiands in some tribal cultures, or ex-prisoners and mental patients in our own. According to Douglas, such persons are in a condition of ‘danger’, ‘contagion’ and ‘pollution’, and may behave in an antisocial manner. ‘Danger lies in transitional states’, she writes, ‘simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger, and emanates danger to others.’¹² Douglas’ description of social marginality and its effects is both relevant and instructive when considered in the context of Shakespeare’s plays. Figures like Mariana (‘neither maid, widow, nor wife’ [Measure V. i. 177–8]), Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, or Coriolanus banished from Rome – to choose only a few examples – may aptly be characterized as marginal persons, whose outcast conditions threaten both themselves and the social worlds they inhabit.

Equally suggestive for students of Shakespeare is the work of Victor Turner, and particularly Turner’s theory of ‘liminality’,¹³ which he defines as ‘any condition outside or on the periphery of everyday life’¹⁴ – clearly an idea very close to Douglas’ ‘marginal state’, or indeed to Barber’s ‘holiday’. Turner, however, is chiefly interested in social organization and in the tensions that underlie social groups, tensions he sees as taking the form of a dialectical movement from structure to anti-structure, or from ‘fixed’ to ‘floating’ worlds. He argues for the existence of a three-part model of social development, from ‘structure’ to ‘communitas’ to ‘societas’,¹⁵ that corresponds with remarkable accuracy to the Shakespearean pattern of court-country–court or city–wilderness–city. ‘Structure’, for Turner, is a highly o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Separation and Individuation
• 3. Nomination and Election
• 4. Plain Speaking
• 5. Women’s Rites
• 6. Comparison and Distinction
• 7. Death and Dying
• L’envoy
• Index