Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

One of the commonplaces of Shakespeare criticism is that the comedies end in marriage. This is not technically true: as one of the male suitors, Berowne, points out in Love's Labour's Lost (1594–5), “The ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy,” but it does not: their “wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Gill” (5.2.874–6). In a number of other plays, such as Twelfth Night (1601–2), the marriage is deferred, or, as in All's Well That Ends Well (1602–3), threatened with divorce (see also Orgel 1996 : 17; Shannon 2000 : 186). Even for those plays which do end in marriage, plays are more than their endings, and the comedies' central concern with marriage allows a wide range of commentary on the institution and its workings. As a number of critics have pointed out, there is nothing “natural” about the marital heterosexuality which closes comedies; the marriage plots are often hurried, deferred, or anxiously enforced, “intersected” with homoerotic relationships, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–6), or existing alongside of them, as in The Merchant of Venice (1596–7) ( DiGangi 1997 : 62; Schwarz 2000 ; Pequigney 1992 ; Patterson 1999 ). Furthermore, as Laurie Shannon has recently argued, however normative heterosexual coupling may have been as hierarchy and means of social reproduction in the period, it contradicted the likeness topos ... log in or subscribe to read full text