Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom

Cesar Lombardi Barber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839858
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.
"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction
This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.

SIX

May Games and Metamorphoses
on a Midsummer Night

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

If Shakespeare had called A Midsummer Night’s Dream by a title that referred to pageantry and May games, the aspects of it with which I shall be chiefly concerned would be more often discussed. To honor a noble wedding, Shakespeare gathered up in a play the sort of pageantry which was usually presented piece-meal at aristocratic entertainments, in park and court as well as in hall. And the May game, everybody’s pastime, gave the pattern for his whole action, which moves “from the town to the grove” and back again, bringing in summer to the bridal. These things were familiar and did not need to be stressed by a title.

Shakespeare’s young men and maids, like those Stubbes described in May games, “run gadding over night to the woods, . . . where they spend the whole night in pleasant pastimes—” and in the fierce vexation which often goes with the pastimes of falling in and out of love and threatening to fight about it. “And no marvel,” Stubbes exclaimed about such headlong business, “for there is a great Lord present among them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports, namely, Satan, prince of hell.”¹ In making Oberon, prince of fairies, into the May king, Shakespeare urbanely plays with the notion of a supernatural power at work in holiday: he presents the common May game presided over by an aristocratic garden god. Titania is a Summer Lady who “waxeth wounder proud”:

I am a spirit of no common rate,

The summer still doth tend upon my state . . .

(III.i.157–158)

And Puck, as jester, promotes the “night-rule” version of misrule over which Oberon is superintendent and lord in the “haunted grove.” The lovers originally meet

in the wood, a league without the town,

Where I did meet thee once with Helena

To do observance to a morn of May.

(I.i.165–167)

Next morning, when Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers sleeping, it is after their own early “observation is performed”—presumably some May-game observance, of a suitably aristocratic kind, for Theseus jumps to the conclusion that

No doubt they rose up early to observe

The rite of May; and, hearing our intent,

Came here in grace of our solemnity.

(IV.i.135–137)

These lines need not mean that the play’s action happens on May Day. Shakespeare does not make himself accountable for exact chronological inferences; the moon that will be new according to Hippolyta will shine according to Bottom’s almanac. And in any case, people went Maying at various times, “Against May, Whitsunday, and other time” is the way Stubbes puts it. This Maying can be thought of as happening on a midsummer night, even on Midsummer Eve itself, so that its accidents are complicated by the delusions of a magic time. (May Week at Cambridge University still comes in June.) The point of the allusions is not the date, but the kind of holiday occasion.² The Maying is completed when Oberon and Titania with their trains come into the great chamber to bring the blessings of fertility. They are at once common and special, a May king and queen making their good luck visit to the manor house, and a pair of country gods, half-English and half-Ovid, come to bring their powers in tribute to great lords and ladies.

The play’s relationship to pageantry is most prominent in the scene where the fairies are introduced by our seeing their quarrel. This encounter is the sort of thing that Elizabeth and the wedding party might have happened on while walking about in the park during the long summer dusk. The fairy couple accuse each other of the usual weakness of pageant personages—a compelling love for royal personages:

Why art thou here,

Come from the farthest steep of India,

But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,

Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love,

To Theseus must be wedded, and you come

To give their bed joy and prosperity?

(II.i.68–73)

Oberon describes an earlier entertainment, very likely one in which the family of the real-life bride or groom had been concerned:

My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb’rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory

And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back . . .

That very time I saw (but thou couldst not)

Flying between the cold moon and the earth

Cupid, all arm’d. A certain aim he took

At a fair Vestal, throned by the West,

And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,

And the imperial votress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

(II.i.147–164)

At the entertainment at Elvetham in 1591, Elizabeth was throned by the west side of a garden lake to listen to music from the water; the fairy queen came with a round of dancers and spoke of herself as wife to Auberon. These and other similarities make it quite possible, but not necessary, that Shakespeare was referring to the Elvetham occasion.³ There has been speculation, from Warburton on down, aimed at identifying the mermaid and discovering in Cupid’s fiery shaft a particular bid for Elizabeth’s affections; Leicester’s Kenilworth entertainment in 1575 was usually taken as the occasion alluded to, despite the twenty years that had gone by when Shakespeare wrote.⁴ No one, however, has cogently demonstrated any reference to court intrigue—which is to be expected in view of the fact that the play, after its original performance, was on the public stage. The same need for discretion probably accounts for the lack of internal evidence as to the particular marriage the comedy originally celebrated.⁵ But what is not in doubt, and what matters for our purpose here, is the kind of occasion Oberon’s speech refers to, the kind of occasion Shakespeare’s scene is shaped by. The speech describes, in retrospect, just such a joyous overflow of pleasure into music and make-believe as is happening in Shakespeare’s own play. The fact that what Shakespeare handled with supreme skill was just what was most commonplace no doubt contributes to our inability to connect what he produced with particular historical circumstances.

As we have seen, it was commonplace to imitate Ovid. Ovidian fancies pervade A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and especially the scene of the fairy quarrel: the description of the way Cupid “loos’d his love shaft” at Elizabeth parallels the Metamorphoses’ account of the god’s shooting “his best arrow, with the golden head” at Apollo; Helena, later in the scene, exclaims that “The story shall be chang’d:/Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase”—and proceeds to invert animal images from Ovid.⁶ The game was not so much to lift things gracefully from Ovid as it was to make up fresh things in Ovid’s manner, as Shakespeare here, by playful mythopoesis, explains the bad weather by his fairies’ quarrel and makes up a metamorphosis of the little Western flower to motivate the play’s follies and place Elizabeth superbly above them.⁷ The pervasive Ovidian influence accounts for Theseus’ putting fables and fairies in the same breath when he says, punning on ancient and antic,

I never may believe

These antique fables nor these fairy toys.

(V.i.2–3)

The humor of the play relates superstition, magic and passionate delusion as “fancy’s images.” The actual title emphasizes a sceptical attitude by calling the comedy a “dream.” It seems unlikely that the title’s characterization of the dream, “a midsummer night’s dream,” implies association with the specific customs of Midsummer Eve, the shortest night of the year, except as “midsummer night” would carry suggestions of a magic time. The observance of Midsummer Eve in England centered on building bonfires or “bonefires,” of which there is nothing in Shakespeare’s moonlight play. It was a time when maids might find out who their true love would be by dreams or divinations. There were customs of decking houses with greenery and hanging lights, which just possibly might connect with the fairies’ torches at the comedy’s end. And when people gathered fern seed at midnight, sometimes they spoke of spirits whizzing invisibly past. If one ranges through the eclectic pages of The Golden Bough, guided by the index for Midsummer Eve, one finds other customs suggestive of Shakespeare’s play, involving moonlight, seeing the moon in water, gathering dew, and so on, but in Sweden, Bavaria, or still more remote places, rather than England.⁸ One can assume that parallel English customs have been lost, or one can assume that Shakespeare’s imagination found its way to similarities with folk cult, starting from the custom of Maying and the general feeling that spirits may be abroad in the long dusks and short nights of midsummer. Olivia in Twelfth Night speaks of “midsummer madness” (III.iv.61). In the absence of evidence, there is no way to settle just how much comes from tradition. But what is clear is that Shakespeare was not simply writing out folklore which he heard in his youth, as Romantic critics liked to assume. On the contrary, his fairies are produced by a complex fusion of pageantry and popular game, as well as popular fancy. Moreover, as we shall see, they are not serious in the menacing way in which the people’s fairies were serious. Instead they are serious in a very different way, as embodiments of the May-game experience of eros in men and women and trees and flowers, while any superstitious tendency to believe in their literal reality is mocked. The whole night’s action is presented as a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination. We watch a dream; but we are awake, thanks to pervasive humor about the tendency to take fantasy literally, whether in love, in superstition, or in Bottom’s mechanical dramatics. As in Love’s Labour’s Lost the folly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• One: Introduction: The Saturnalian Pattern
• Two: Holiday Custom and Entertainment
• Three: Misrule as Comedy; Comedy as Misrule
• Four: Prototypes of Festive Comedy in a Pageant Entertainment: Summer’s Last Will and Testament
• Five: The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Six: May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night
• Seven: The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder
• Eight: Rule and Misrule in Henry IV
• Nine: The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in as You Like it
• Ten: Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night
• Index