Love's Argument

Gender Relations in Shakespeare

Marianne Novy

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807897386, 9780807816080
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610191
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

Novy demonstrates how the plays are theatrical transformations of tensions in both ideals and practices in Renaissance society. Analyzing the dramatic images of lover and beloved, of husband and wife, of parent and child, Novy examines the ways in which the conflicts are resolved in the comedies and romances and how they are acted out in the tragedies. Chapters on individual plays provide original interpretations that delineate the tone and texture of gender relations.

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Chapter One
Introduction: Patriarchy and Mutuality, Control and Emotion

Why have Shakespeare’s dramatic images of love and power in relations between the sexes fascinated so many diverse audiences? In her Commonplace Book, George Eliot noted a crucial aspect of this fascination: “It is remarkable that Shakespear’s women almost always make love, in opposition to the conventional notion of what is fitting for women. Yet his pictures of women are belauded.”¹ How can they be praised both by standard critics of the midnineteenth century and by current feminist critics? Juliet Dusinberre, for example, concludes that “Shakespeare saw men and women as equal in a world which declared them unequal.”² More to the point here than Victorian writings, why were they also praised implicitly by the heterogeneous audience who made him popular in his own time? The dimension of Shakespeare’s appeal that I will explore in this book is that his plays are symbolic transformations of ambivalence about gender relations and about qualities his language sometimes calls the “man” and “woman” within the self.

I suggest that Shakespeare’s plays symbolically resolve in the comedies and the romances and act out in the tragedies two related but distinct conflicts—the conflict between mutuality and patriarchy and the conflict between emotion and control. Both conflicts involve the politics of gender: the first, in power relations between the sexes; the second, in the relative value of qualities symbolically associated with each gender. Patriarchy literally means the rule of fathers, and in an extended sense the rule of husbands over wives and men in general over women.³ Mutuality, by contrast, may be defined, following Erik Erikson, as a “relationship in which partners depend on each other for the development of their respective strengths.”⁴ While the word itself does not necessarily imply equality or inequality, it implies sharing and companionship, recognition of the activity and subjectivity of both partners. The conflict between emotion and control often explicitly involves metaphors of gender; it also creates difficulty in relations between the sexes.⁵ In plays where men try to control women whom they see as irrational, the two conflicts often coalesce.

One of the reasons Shakespeare’s plays can have meaning today beyond their status as institutionalized monuments is that these conflicts still have resonance in our society. Patriarchy takes a different form in America in the 1980s than it did in England in the 1600s. Yet the language and action of the plays allow audiences of different times to see recognizable motivations in the characters. Awareness of my own engagement in performances and reading of the plays has led me to historical research about Elizabethan England, where I found evidence of the same conflicts and tensions I see in the plays. It was by no means a monolithic society.

A surprising range of evidence suggests that both patriarchy and mutuality were ideals for marriage in Elizabethan England, whatever everyday behavior was like. Marriage sermons frequently use rhetoric invoking both. For example, Henry Smith, an extremely popular preacher whose sermons were often reprinted, uses many images of partnership and friendship in his Preparative to Marriage, published in 1591. Husband and wife are like a pair of oars, a pair of gloves, and even David and Jonathan. He further notes, “Therefore one saith, that marriage doth signify merriage, because a plaifellow is come to make our age merrie, as Isaack and Rebeccah sported together.” Yet a few pages later he declares that “the ornament of a woman is silence; and therefore the law was given to the man rather than to the woman, to shewe that he shoulde be the teacher and shee the hearer.”⁶ Smith is one of a number of puritan preachers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in whom William and Malleville Haller find a similar combination of attitudes: “Everything in the past of these men required them to think of the family as patriarchal, and yet, the more important the family became to them as an institution, the more important became the role they found themselves assigning to women in the life of men.”⁷ The Hallers emphasize these preachers’ praise of marriage as spiritual companionship and their respect for the responsibility and active personal virtues to be shown by women in marriage. While a number of historians have described this combination of patriarchy and mutuality as puritan in origin, more recently Lawrence Stone sees it as present also in Anglican moral theology and Kathleen Davies has shown that it can be found as well in writings about marriage by Catholics such as William Harrington and Richard Whitford.⁸

Such sermons, of whatever theological bent, contain no suggestion that this combination of ideals might involve tension. Other kinds of historical evidence, concerned with practice and not ideals, give a different picture. Most strikingly, there seems to have been increased strain on aristocratic marriages just at the time Shakespeare was writing. Between 1595 and 1620, one-third of the older peers, according to Stone, were estranged or separated from their wives.⁹ Was this because, as he suggests in The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, the middle-class belief in equality had risen to the aristocracy and emboldened women to struggle for better treatment?¹⁰ Or was it because, as he suggests in his later Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, intensified enforcement of patriarchy was reducing women’s previous freedom?¹¹ Whether the situation of Elizabethan women was better or worse than that of their predecessors, tension between patriarchy and companionship existed in the practice of the aristocracy, as it existed without acknowledgment in the sermons. The middleclass controversial literature about women and the diaries discussed by Keith Wrightson suggest similar tensions elsewhere.¹² I am not, however, suggesting explicit Elizabethan awareness of a conflict between patriarchy and mutuality; it is largely the recent development of feminist theory that has made it possible, now that patriarchy need not be taken for granted as a cultural belief, to examine what extends it and what challenges it, to see the ideals that in practice could be harmoniously compromised or could produce an unarticulated sense of tension.¹³

But the plays are theatrical transformations of the social tensions that give them some of their subject matter and their appeal to a divided audience, not examples of Elizabethan social history. Evidence about the typicality in its society of events in a play can help interpret the play only if we take into account the specifics of how the play presents those events; spectators may admire behavior in a play that they would not admire in real life, if the playwright is skillful enough in using their conflicting feelings as well as the conventions of theater.

Using such skill, in his comedies and romances Shakespeare creates images of gender relations that keep elements of both patriarchy and mutuality in suspension. Though the balance may tip in one direction or another, the predominance of playfulness and of festive disguise helps to remove threatening elements in the comedies. Even in The Taming of the Shrew, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Petruchio is not only a dominant husband but also a player of games he wants Kate to join. When she finally does, it is partly a matter of beginning to speak the same language; she agrees to follow him in renaming the sun as the moon and elaborates on his greeting of an old man as a young girl. Because Kate and Petruchio share in this game of verbally creating a new world in which anything can be its opposite, we can, if we wish, see game qualities in her long speech on women’s duty to their husbands. Petruchio’s power as husband coalesces with his power as leader of a game, and we may take as primary whichever definition of Kate’s relationship to him we prefer—patriarchal or playful.

In most Shakespearean comedies, as we will see in Chapters 2 and 4, the balance is different. The women may control the games, like Portia or Rosalind. Even those less in command—Viola or Beatrice—escape the trials that Kate undergoes. They and their lovers speak each other’s language in most of their encounters, although often through some kind of disguise. Before the characters directly offer and ask love, they ask and yield response to wit and verbal style. In all of these comedies the women are active throughout and the relationships are presented as developing by a mutuality of talking together. Shakespeare even allows them to criticize the limits that their society places on them as women—both by their words and by their competence in the masculine disguise that removes some of these limits. Nevertheless, as Clara Claiborne Park has shown, several of the heroines end their comedies with ritual gestures of submission.¹⁴ Even masculine disguise can be taken as a softening of female assertiveness because it permits us to take anything a woman says or does while in disguise as only part of a role to be discarded. And, as Carolyn Heilbrun has pointed out, we may take the relationships created by some of these couples as allowing the women more freedom only because their condition is still courtship and not marriage.¹⁵ Thus again Shakespeare gives us an ambiguous picture in which both those who emphasize patriarchy and those who emphasize a mutuality that involves female activity can find some elements to please them and, if they wish, take those as the essentials.

Tragic heroines like Juliet, Cordelia, and Desdemona also combine strength and flexibility attractively. Desdemona, for example, bravely chooses Othello and defends her choice before Venice, but she uses the argument that she is acting just as her mother did in following her father. As Chapter 7 will show, her combination of partnership and deference leaves her vulnerable to Othello’s attack. Juliet’s attempt to reconcile mutuality and patriarchy also leads to death, as we will see in Chapter 6, because the feud, like war, identifies masculinity with violence.

Later tragedies combine mutuality and patriarchy in a synthesis more clearly destructive from the start. Lady Macbeth and Volumnia accept some social limitations on what women can do directly at the same time as they seek vicarious achievement by encouraging husband and son to the violence they cannot themselves commit. Just as other female characters can be praised for widely diverging reasons, these can be analyzed by feminists as displaying stereotypically feminine qualities—influencing men through traditional roles of wife and mother—although traditionalist critics can describe them as masculine.

The romances dramatize women’s vulnerability and familial identity more than do the comedies, but they conclude with more emphatic portrayals of female resilience. However much Hermione, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda seem familially defined, they all maintain some verbal independence from men. But Leontes still assumes that Paulina, who has converted and punished him and apparently brought his wife back from the dead, will agree to his arrangement of her marriage to Camillo.

Not surprisingly, the comedies emphasize more the negotiation of different social ideals while the tragedies stress more the intrapsychic struggle between emotion and control; the romances link the themes further as they link family ties and family feeling. The chapters that follow will, in general, be weighted accordingly, but both concerns persist throughout Shakespeare’s plays. In his treatment of the conflict between emotion and control, as well as that between mutuality and patriarchy, Shakespeare seems to be transforming a conflict of Elizabethan culture. We do not need to accept all of Stone’s claims in Family, Sex, and Marriage about Elizabethan “psychic numbing” to see in his work, combined with that of other historians as different as Alan Macfarlane and Randolph Trumbach, evidence that there was an ideal personality type valued by many Elizabethans—an ideal that kept feelings of attachment and grief under strict control but was more ready to act out feelings of anger.¹⁶ To borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s term, it was a kind of ideal for self-fashioning.¹⁷

We can see the attempt to transmit this ideal in, for example, letters of advice from aristocratic fathers to sons, which, according to Stone, “normally express a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature, full of canny and worldly-wise hints about how to conduct personal relations which leave little room for generosity, faith, hope or charity” (FSM, p. 96). We can see it in the sermons that warned parents not to love their children too much, because they might die. Perhaps we can also see it in the frequent separation of children from their parents: upperclass children were sent out to wet nurses and often, around the age of ten, to boarding school; about the same age many middle- and lower-middle class children moved to their master’s household to begin work as domestic servants, laborers, and apprentices (pp. 105–14). And we may glimpse the effect of the expression allowed to anger in the “extraordinary amount of casual violence at all levels of society” (p. 93) that Stone finds in the diaries, correspondence, and legal records from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

Stone gives largely unexplored hints that patterns and norms of emotional warmth differed according to sex. The parents quoted as sounding distant from children are mostly fathers; furthermore, Stone sees fathers as colder to daughters than to sons, more likely to consider daughters as only a drain on their money. He also provides anecdotes in which women want more emotional involvement in marriage than do men (p. 105). All this suggests that the letters of advice were attempts to initiate sons to the coldness expected of the adult male and that the model of emotional control was primarily a masculine ideal.¹⁸ Because masculinity was more valued than femininity, the emphasis on control could influence women as well, and any woman’s deviations from it could be seen as signs of typically feminine weakness. Popular thought often identified women with passion and men with reason, with an emphasis on the necessary subordination of the first pair to die second; since women, whether nurses or mothers, had primary responsibility for child-rearing, they were associated with everyone’s first discovery of emotions.¹⁹ Many documents suggest that Elizabethan men were often suspicious of women, and this suspicion may very well coalesce with a conventional masculine ideal of emotional distance.

In any event, attempts to follow this ideal would lead both sexes to difficulties in establishing and maintaining relationships; consequent frustration could fuel the anger expressed; throughout life one might be influenced by an emotional dependence that one constantly denied. If emotional distance was an ideal for self-fashioning, it could coexist with hatred and with (denied) love.

But even examples of its transmission suggest other complexities of feeling. If aristocratic fathers told sons not to trust anyone, perhaps sons provoked the advice by trusting people. If sermons threatened that God might take away a child whose parents were too fond, some parents must have grieved intensely for their children. Furthermore, as Alan Macfarlane suggests, Elizabethan society probably included “some loving parents and some cruel parents, some people bringing up their children in a rigid way, others in a relaxed atmosphere, deep attachment between certain husbands and wives, frail emotional bonds in other cases.”²⁰ The contrasting elements in this mix would not remain inert; at least some people would notice the differences and would be affected by them. Probably Elizabethan England was not so much Stone’s “low-affect” society as one divided within itself about emotion.

The relevance of this conflict, as well as the one between mutuality and patriarchy, to Shakespeare’s original audience may be heightened if we consider that, as Louis Adrian Montrose has pointed out, “perhaps half the population was under twenty, and that the youthfulness of Shakespeare’s society was reflected in the composition of his audience.”²¹ Most Elizabethan marriages took place between partners in their middle and late twenties—and thus a very high proportion of Shakespeare’s audience was delaying marriage, considering its possibility, or negotiating its early stages.²² A high percentage of the males in the audience had not gained the social status of manhood or were at an age when they were still negotiating their relations to its ideals as well.

If establishing or admitting emotional ties was difficult for many in Shakespeare’s audience partly because of their ideals of control and other social restrictions, this ambivalence may have contributed to the appeal of his plays. In the tragedies, the cost of either denying or affirming connections can be mortal; in the comedies and r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction: Patriarchy and Mutuality, Control and Emotion
• Chapter Two: “An You Smile Not, He’s Gagged”: Mutuality in Shakespearean Comedy
• Chapter Three: Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew
• Chapter Four: Giving and Taking in The Merchant of Venice
• Chapter Five: Tragic Women as Actors and Audience
• Chapter Six: Violence, Love, and Gender in Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida
• Chapter Seven: Marriage and Mutuality in Othello
• Chapter Eight: Patriarchy, Mutuality, and Forgiveness in King Lear
• Chapter Nine: Transformed Images of Manhood in the Romances
• Chapter Ten: Shakespeare’s Imagery of Gender and Gender Crossing
• Notes
• Index