THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

women begin to take place on something approaching an equal footing. Where in the tragedies the vivid
independence of a Desdemona is stifled by the weight of male circumstance and the courage of Cordelia is ignored
and disparaged, in the comedies women’s integrity and intelligence do not merely shine, they briefly triumph.
The structural awkwardness and the many loose ends of what are probably Shakespeare’s two earliest comedies,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1587) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1588), suggest a beginner’s uncertainty
about dramatic technique and form. Both plays also indicate the degree to which he was dramatizing the ambiguities
of his age concerning the freedom of women to act and think independently in courtship and marriage. In the first, a
woman dangerously resolves to prove her faith to an undeserving lover; in the second, a woman is brutally schooled in
wifely duty by a husband who appears not to merit her service. As part of the contorted plot of The Two Gentlemen of
Verona Julia disguises herself as a man in order to follow Proteus from Verona to Milan. Her action (common enough
in the prose literature of the sixteenth century) is the first of Shakespeare’s many theatrical experiments with the
device of female cross-dressing, or, to be more precise, with the disconcerting nuances of a boy actor dressing as a boy
while playing the role of a woman. However much Julia’s romantic ploy may be related to the European carnival
tradition of transvestism, it is one that the far more rumbustiously carnivalesque The Taming of the Shrew carefully
eschews. The unromantic Katherina’s ‘taming’ by the far from gentle Petruchio consists of a series of rough games,
staged tantrums, and physical trials. Throughout, Katherina has to meet direct challenges to her assumed identity and
to cope with the antics of a man whose volatility appears to be equally assumed. Finally both have to drop false
identities and proclaim their mutual respect. Katherina’s public response to her last test, in which she is called upon
to affirm a kind of feudal submission to her husband’s will (‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, | Thy head,
thy sovereign, one that cares for thee ...’), has been seen by some as a properly cynical response to a hardened cynic.
Nevertheless, Katherina’s servile placing of her hands beneath Petruchio’s foot is answered not by a kick, but by a
raising from her knees and a kiss.
Throughout his career Shakespeare amplified, varied, and, at times, reversed the ambiguous gestures of his earliest
experiments with comedy. The slick Roman symmetry of The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589-94) is relieved by reflections
on family and amatory relationships which almost slip into tender-
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ness. The familial and matrimonial sulkiness of the Athenians with which A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-6)
opens is reflected in the far more acrimonious and threatening disputes of Oberon and Titania. The play begins with
crossed purposes; it unwinds, ironically enough, with a tidiness enforced by the interference of that traditional
embodiment of the malign disordering of human affairs, Puck; it ends with multiple marriages celebrated to the
accompaniment of a superbly inept tragic entertainment and with the blessing of the once disruptive fairies. As the
human lovers wake from their respective dreams in Act IV, each is discovered magically placed beside an unexpected
but ‘proper’ partner, but it is the once rejected Helena who has the hazy wisdom to grasp that she has ‘found
Demetrius like a jewel, | Mine own and not mine own’. Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a matter of uncertain
discovery; it both claims possession and is obliged to recognize distinctions, differences, individualities. Much the
same is true of the discountenancing of the rash and possessive presumptions of the male lovers at the end of Love’s
Labour’s Lost (c. 1593-4). In a play shaped around role-playing, word-games, and rhetorical devices it is shockingly
apt that at the end life should encounter death, that verbal posturings should be countered by ‘Honest plain words’,
and that sentimental male pretensions of love should be squashed by the Princess’s hard-headed insistence that they
were received merely as ‘bombast and as lining to the time’. When the King of Navarre protests that his proposal of
marriage should be accepted at this ‘latest minute of the hour’, the Princess has the presence of mind to rebut him
with the most refined and serious of all Shakespeare's put-downs: ‘A time, methinks, too short | To make a worldwithout-end
bargain in’. The play concludes with separations. Jack has not Jill, winter succeeds spring, and characters
leave the stage ‘severally’ to live apart for a twelve month, perhaps for ever.
Although The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597) (which so inspired Verdi and his librettist, Boito) has tended to
be overshadowed in the twentieth century by the popularity of the romantic comedies, its position in Shakespeare’s
comic œ uvre is central in more than simply the chronological sense. Shakespeare re-introduces characters (Falstaff,
Mistress Quickly, Pistol, Nym, and Shallow) from his Henry IV plays, but, by implication, he also transfers the setting
from Plantagenet to late Tudor England. Its scene is a prosperous English town on the fringes of a royal castle and its
park, not an imagined Illyria or an unlocated Arden; its characters are mercantile not noble, and its language is
colloquial rather than lyrical. Despite this down-to-earth prosiness, the play allows for the triumph of romantic love
over the well-intentioned schemes of parents and the ill-conceived ones of a would-be adulterer. Jack (Fenton) woos
and wins his Jill (Anne Page), but Ford, Page, Caius, Slender, and Falstaff, all in their different ways, conspicuously
fail in their designs. Although the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor may lack the bouncy resilience of the
Falstaff of I Henry IV, his role as a self deceived and preposterous wooer of married women is crucial to the
presentation of sexual politics in the play. He is