1 Introduction Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of comedy and tragedy have been depicted in opposition to one another. Within the resulting hierarchy of dramatic forms comedy had been relegated to an inferior position, the reason for this being a paternalistic preoccupation with the identification and validation of particular objects considered suitable for intellectual scrutiny. If tragedy is regarded as the philosophically superior of the two genres, and an implicitly masculine form in this dialectic, then comedy, because of its ‘popular’ historical identification with social mores, is relegated to an inferior position. This thesis seeks to reconsider the place of comedy as an object of serious intellectual enquiry, and will argue that its historical importance traces a dialectical movement that informs both the aesthetic form itself, and the passage of history. Indeed, the dialectic of desire that informs comedy, and that always poses a threat to the existing order, may be said to resemble the dialectical movement of history itself as a process whereby existing social tensions are identified and negotiated. It will be argued that Shakespeare’s comedies represent these conflicts in particular ways, and that the conclusions that they reach leave a residue of unresolved tensions that remain to threaten even the revisionary order that the plays posit. The dialectic of comedy that this thesis identifies exposes the inherent tension that is present in all antitheses, and the argument proceeds by making the contradictions inherent in the form explicit. Comedy is concerned primarily with the categories of the explicitly sexual and the implicitly political, and in the case of Shakespeare, the interest is in patriarchal law: the patriarchal law sanctioned by the state, but also what is presumed to be natural law. Thus although the substance of
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1
Introduction
Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of comedy and tragedy have been
depicted in opposition to one another. Within the resulting hierarchy of dramatic
forms comedy had been relegated to an inferior position, the reason for this being a
paternalistic preoccupation with the identification and validation of particular objects
considered suitable for intellectual scrutiny. If tragedy is regarded as the
philosophically superior of the two genres, and an implicitly masculine form in this
dialectic, then comedy, because of its ‘popular’ historical identification with social
mores, is relegated to an inferior position. This thesis seeks to reconsider the place of
comedy as an object of serious intellectual enquiry, and will argue that its historical
importance traces a dialectical movement that informs both the aesthetic form itself,
and the passage of history. Indeed, the dialectic of desire that informs comedy, and
that always poses a threat to the existing order, may be said to resemble the dialectical
movement of history itself as a process whereby existing social tensions are identified
and negotiated. It will be argued that Shakespeare’s comedies represent these
conflicts in particular ways, and that the conclusions that they reach leave a residue of
unresolved tensions that remain to threaten even the revisionary order that the plays
posit.
The dialectic of comedy that this thesis identifies exposes the inherent tension
that is present in all antitheses, and the argument proceeds by making the
contradictions inherent in the form explicit. Comedy is concerned primarily with the
categories of the explicitly sexual and the implicitly political, and in the case of
Shakespeare, the interest is in patriarchal law: the patriarchal law sanctioned by the
state, but also what is presumed to be natural law. Thus although the substance of
2
comedy may be said to emphasise the libidinal energies that seek to challenge that
law, its manner of dealing with this potentially disruptive force is anything but
irrational or inconsequential since it attempts to resolve tensions and dilemmas
through forms of rational discussion. In fact, it will be argued that the initial
hypotheses of Shakespearean comedy lead directly to the exposure of contradictions
that mount challenges to their claims to represent the source of truth. These
hypotheses, often involving the assertions of patriarchal law, function as obstacles that
require resolution. But that resolution involves more than simply a capitulation to the
extant power; indeed, what we might call the idiom of patriarchy requires to be
expanded and transformed in order to accommodate those energies that it seeks
initially to neutralise. To this extent comedy is frequently involved in a process of
cross-examination, deploying as it does a Socratic method whose momentum
simulates that of the progress of a law-suit. In its inclusivity, comedy resembles the
Hegelian dialectic insofar as it is concerned ultimately with epistemological questions
that inform the business of living in society.
Some recourse to a Hegelian historicism will be an important component of
the following arguments because it indicates that all human societies, and, indeed,
human activity generally, are defined by their histories, to the point where their
essences can only be understood through history as the operation of a temporal
dialectic. The relationship between Shakespearean comedy and the canonical law of
literary genre will be explored within this context. But close scrutiny will reveal that
far from resolving contradiction, the diacritical method that the following arguments
identify disclose, often involuntarily, an ontological undecidability that offers
momentary glimpses of other possibilities. In this way Shakespeare’s comic art
3
interrogates both the existing order, and the commonplace by occasionally (and
temporarily) propelling its audiences towards visions of alternative futures.
The social specificity of comedy acts as a counter to any claims to
universalism. Humour and laughter, the phenomenological effects of comedy, are
notoriously poor travellers as indicated by the nature of regional and geographically
specific jokes. The same might be said of the temporal dimension of comedy since
topicality is a constant trigger for humour. Moreover, the appearance of jokes and
comic interludes immediately following traumatic events, validate the process as a
means of ameliorating, if not purging, social anxiety. Elizabethan and Jacobean
culture and the comedies that they produced are of particular interest precisely
because of the traumatic and often perplexing paradigm shifts that were taking place
at the time. The anxieties that these shifts produced are recorded in historical
documents, but they are also theatrically represented in stage-plays, that, as historical
artefacts themselves encode at a domestic level these intense social concerns.
In Chapter 1 the choice of genre will be introduced as a source of historical
evaluation: that is to say, initial emphasis will be placed upon the dramatist’s
conscious endeavour to represent aesthetically intense socio-political upheaval from
within a particular frame of consciousness. A dramatist may enter into a form of
contract with an audience by declaring that a play belongs to one particular genre, but
the conventions of generic nomenclature are rarely as stable as this suggests, as
evidenced in the titular changes in the Comedies themselves. For example, the
interchangeability of the genres of ‘comedy’ and ‘history’ during the Elizabethan
period require some degree of articulation since both forms represent renewals of
social harmony that follow on from the disorder of a diseased body politic. In
focussing on the awareness that comedy is a kind of festive form of history, it is
4
necessary to trace initially the outline of Renaissance definitions of comedy that
emphasise the festive nature of the theatre as an institution.
C.L.Barber’s definition of comedy as “a kind of history”1 privileges an
historicist methodology that asserts an understanding of the original context of
reception. Barber’s view of comic history as “the kind that frames the mind to mirth”2
recalls Hayden White’s identification of comedy as an historical mode of
‘emplotment’ that uses the trope of synecdoche to integrate parts into a larger
historical whole where “struggle, strife, and conflict are dissolved in the realisation of
perfect harmony.” 3 Although the following arguments make little explicit use of
Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959) they do owe a debt of gratitude to his
study of the historical nature of Shakespearean comedy. His description of the fusing
together of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance theatrical traditions with early
modern forms of holiday festivity points towards the significance of ritual as “a
paradoxical human need, problem and resource.” 4 Barber’s work has subsequently
been taken up and developed by scholars such as Francois Laroque, and Naomi Conn
Liebler, 5 but he does not elaborate on the politics of race and gender that
contemporary criticism now recognises as an important element in Elizabethan and
Jacobean comedy.
The politics of comedy can be viewed with greater clarity as a result of the
juxtaposing of law and low culture, the sacred and the profane, or indeed the tragic
and comic elements of everyday experience. This is theorised and applied in Chapter
1 C.L.Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, (Princeton, 1959), p.12 2 Ibid. 3 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in CulturalCriticism, (Baltimore and London, 1985), pp.67-8 4 Op.cit., p.15 5 Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, (Cambridge, 1991), and Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, (New York and London,1995).
5
2 of this thesis through an analytical exploration of representative Shakespearean
comedies that betray a self-consciousness of their own generic classifications.
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1597) and Measure for Measure (1604) are
two plays that exemplify the conflict between comic and tragic modes. Identifying
moments of potential tragedy in these ‘dark’ comedies serves as a means of
positioning generic conflict as a structural principle that proves to be as important as
the plays’ comic themes of the conflict between genders. The process of resolution
with which both these plays are preoccupied, and their preoccupation with a quasi-
legalistic staging of conflict suggest an analogue with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
concept of the differend. Lyotard argues that the differend is a term he uses to identify
“the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that
reason a victim,” but he goes on to suggest that:
A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.6
Lyotard goes on to argue that the differend “is signalled by this inability to prove. The
one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps
the same one, is reduced to silence.” 7
The incompatibility of idioms, and the need to arbitrate cases, along with the
resultant negotiations that are brought into play, render the concept of the differend
more serviceable that Northrop Frye’s definition of the action of comedy as being one
that resembles a ‘law-suit’,8 since it can be argued that in this case aesthetic form
6 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, (Manchester, 1988), p.9 7 Ibid., p.10 8 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, (Princeton, 1957), p.166
6
constitutes a mode of intellectual enquiry that is capable of formulating alternatives to
any ideological imperative. This is not to say that art is a substitute for the
epistemological objectives of a philosophy, but rather to suggest that it can furnish a
knowledge that philosophy itself cannot. In short, it is the underside of philosophy in
just the same way that alternative meanings escape the straitjacket of ideological
form. What the dramatist does is to clarify the opposition between repression and
subversion and in doing so articulates what cannot be expressed. The discovery of the
means within critical discourse to articulate radical alternatives despite the constraints
imposed by a dominant ‘idiom’ replete with its linguistic, epistemological and
political prohibitions, is the motivation that lies behind the dialectical drive of this
thesis.
The proximity of the categories of the philosophical, the ethical and the
political to that of the aesthetic narrows, but does not obliterate entirely, the gap
between the philosophy of the human subject in law, and the dramatic persona subject
to the law that regulates genre. Each subject is subjected to a series of rules and
prohibitions; but the capacity of comedy to interrogate epistemological categories, to
cross-examine ‘reality’ results in a challenge to ontological certainty, producing a
radical undecidability that aggravates and disturbs notions of boundary and authority.
Such aggravations are generally relegated to the level of the cultural unconscious, but
the logic of the differend implies a source outside signification that can be identified
as a proximate origin of human creativity, and the starting point for a radical politics.
In his essay ‘Before the Law’ Derrida’s identification of the philosophy of law
as the means of generating moral, juridical and natural law is regarded as a fiction
whose main purpose is the narration of the prohibition of desire.9 In another essay,
9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, (New York and London, 1992), p.190
7
‘The Law of Genre’ the historicity of the law and the regulation of literary forms in
terms of the prohibitions placed upon the mixing of genres, are regarded as forms of
miscegenation. The second chapter of this thesis attempts to explore the Derridean
conception of the ascription of gender to genre, and pays particular attention to the
phallogocentric nature of the policing of boundaries. The hierarchical imbalance that
is involved in the process of governing, and carrying out surveillance on the
boundaries of the genre/gender divide, testifies to an anxiety generated by the fear of
monstrous or hybrid progeny. This fear is exorcised at a psychological level through
the taboo on incest, but it is also present in an analogous form in the critical
disapproval of the miscegenation of genres.
Chapter 2 tests the theoretical preference for a purity of aesthetic form in the
face of the differend that is performed in every comedy when comedy and tragedy are
forced to appear together on the Comic stage, and where one ‘idiom’ is enjoined to
accept the conditions of articulation of the other. Beneath the exclusions that both
proffer as a discursive restriction imposed upon the other lies a mutual dependency
that each denies the other but that they both need to accept. The refusal of each to
submit to the law of the other makes for the irresolution that Lyotard locates as the
matter of ‘dispute’, but in the comic resolution of conflict, say between different
generations who ostensibly speak different languages, there is an awareness of the
need to control the dominant discourse of the tragic in order to provide a resolution
that keeps the main characters alive and morally exemplary. The law of genre
demands that comedy must end happily, but because the differend can never be
completely resolved, the discriminations that it initiates resist synthesis, so that the
dialectic will always be imperfect. The negative term is always expelled from the
8
solution, or dealing with it is postponed, but it always returns as the excess that
escapes full signification.
In Shakespearean comedy the institution of marriage becomes a central trope,
and Chapter 3 engages with this as central to the thesis. Comedy and tragedy are
presented as culturally specific projections of human consciousness capable of
entertaining both forms as alternative representations. Within the ritual of marital
union psychology merges into symbol, and events frequently take on the logic of
dream, departing from the appearance of the everyday in order to articulate its inner
truth. Central to this symbolism is the figure of woman, who is simultaneously the
heart of life but who is also, within the Christian tradition, radically destructive, and
ultimately a path to redemption. This may be the reason why no masculine villain is
as evil as Goneril in King Lear or why no hero is as good as Portia in The Merchant of
Venice. What renders Shakespeare’s comic heroines so interesting is their capacity to
re-order society almost single-handedly. In such cases woman is the antithesis of a
male consciousness that is forced to move out of itself in order to confront a force
with which it must come to terms if the social order is to survive. This dialectic that is
played out between genders in the Comedies achieves a provisional resolution that is
an analogue of the Hegelian synthesis pressed into the service of a patriarchal model
of society in its returning of the potentially anarchic force of ‘woman’ to a
predominantly phallogocentric hierarchy.
Hegel demonstrates philosophically, and Shakespeare dramatically, that at the
heart of Christian doctrine lies the assertion that human life does not begin until
consciousness divides, and that this division and its articulation are the motor for
history itself and are what comprises the motion of existence. For Hegel human and
divine rationality are identical, and in accordance with the dictates of Enlightenment it
9
is assumed that Man’s reason is infinite in its capacity to contemplate, and control
existence. What for Hegel is a primary separation of Man from God, becomes for
Shakespeare the consequence of the creation of Eve. Woman becomes that which is
taken from Man and that causes his fall. She is wife and mother and threat: she is
forever ambiguous, untrustworthy, fecund, and ultimately redemptive. Viewed in this
way, then the tension between Man and Woman is articulated as a division of Man
from himself that can only be repaired at the end of Comedy through the institutional
ritual of marriage. This is the reason why Chapter 3 regards nuptial rites as the focal
point of any theoretical analysis of comedy. Here the importance of the Derridean
philosopheme of the hymen in addition to conceptualising the notions of union,
boundary and disruptive force10 also glosses the term as a symbol of female purity.
The questions of female purity and the fear of its violation are of direct relevance to
issues of propriety and authority. A consideration of the historicity of these concepts
is essential to an understanding of early modern comedy just as the Christian
distinction between woman as corrupter and redeemer, whore and virgin, are central
to an understanding of the identity of early modern woman.
The responsibility imposed upon the female gender as custodian both of male
sexual desire and the harmony of the entire social order is what troubles the
superficially happy resolutions of comedy. The all-male mode of production upon the
early modern stage may represent an important social ritual whereby division is
rendered whole, where a union of opposites, or the reconciliation of differences can
reasonably be anticipated. But the inversion of femininity by transvestite male actors
10 Throughout Spurs/Éperons, trans. Allan Bass, (Chicago, 1978), and the Double Session, Derrida figures the aporetic or the indeterminate vulvically as the hymen, as that which characterises “The general law of textual effect” (écriture), in direct opposition to the law of the phallus, or the desire for the apodictive or the determinate. These explicit gender identifications of the apodictic with the masculine and the aporetic with the feminine appear throughout Spurs as “That which will not be pinned down by truth is in truth – feminine”, p.55.
10
has been questioned as a male projection of how women should behave, even if these
were men imitating women imitating men. I will therefore argue that the double
negation of this theatrical practice helps to destabilise gender identity through an
explicit disclosure of the artificiality and performativity of gender construction; an
exposition that is as beneficial to men as it is to women.
Using Foucault’s analyses of the ‘technologies of sexuality’, the gender
identities represented in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605) and Middleton and
Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611) disclose an early modern preoccupation with the
cultural construction of gendered subjectivity, through descriptions of identity which
are formulated differentially in and through a range of social institutions, such as
marriage and the family. Comedies rarely end in actual marriage, however, as
anticipating marriage, progressing towards the ‘medicine of marriage’, describes
more accurately the teleological thrust of this dramatic form. This chapter therefore
interrogates C.L. Barber’s structuralist assumption that comedy performs ‘dramatic
epithalamia’ where “the power of love” is expressed “as a compelling rhythm in man
and nature”.11 The trope of marriage undoubtedly represents the inevitable and
irresistible force of an essentialist cosmic order where the regulation of libido
functions as a panacea for social disorder, and although the design of this prescriptive
force is concealed behind the appearance of social and cultural forms, its ideal reality
is destabilised by the ‘realist mimesis’ of comedy which ascribes to the symbolic form
of marriage a material existence. Applied specifically to the realm of early modern
comedy the implicitly sexual and the explicitly political investments made by the
social ritual of marriage can be effectively repositioned within the poetic sub-genre of
11 Barber, op. cit., p.9
11
the prothalamion where a new and stable future is evoked through the symbolic
economy of courtship.
This central chapter rotates the thesis on the axis of gender politics, as the
dialectic of desire further preoccupies those institutions designed to secure domination
and subjection. Proposing that the dramatic prothalamion of comic art has the capacity
to produce alternatives through which representation of the conflicts between these
complex forces is effected recalls Catherine Belsey’s description of the early modern
theatre’s capacity to disclose “meaning and the contests for meaning” within
particular institutions, such as marriage.12 This unremitting concern with the
regulation of human libido permits a liminal view of Renaissance society in which its
phallogocentrism is threatened by…
Introduction
Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of comedy and tragedy have been
depicted in opposition to one another. Within the resulting hierarchy of dramatic
forms comedy had been relegated to an inferior position, the reason for this being a
paternalistic preoccupation with the identification and validation of particular objects
considered suitable for intellectual scrutiny. If tragedy is regarded as the
philosophically superior of the two genres, and an implicitly masculine form in this
dialectic, then comedy, because of its ‘popular’ historical identification with social
mores, is relegated to an inferior position. This thesis seeks to reconsider the place of
comedy as an object of serious intellectual enquiry, and will argue that its historical
importance traces a dialectical movement that informs both the aesthetic form itself,
and the passage of history. Indeed, the dialectic of desire that informs comedy, and
that always poses a threat to the existing order, may be said to resemble the dialectical
movement of history itself as a process whereby existing social tensions are identified
and negotiated. It will be argued that Shakespeare’s comedies represent these
conflicts in particular ways, and that the conclusions that they reach leave a residue of
unresolved tensions that remain to threaten even the revisionary order that the plays
posit.
The dialectic of comedy that this thesis identifies exposes the inherent tension
that is present in all antitheses, and the argument proceeds by making the
contradictions inherent in the form explicit. Comedy is concerned primarily with the
categories of the explicitly sexual and the implicitly political, and in the case of
Shakespeare, the interest is in patriarchal law: the patriarchal law sanctioned by the
state, but also what is presumed to be natural law. Thus although the substance of
2
comedy may be said to emphasise the libidinal energies that seek to challenge that
law, its manner of dealing with this potentially disruptive force is anything but
irrational or inconsequential since it attempts to resolve tensions and dilemmas
through forms of rational discussion. In fact, it will be argued that the initial
hypotheses of Shakespearean comedy lead directly to the exposure of contradictions
that mount challenges to their claims to represent the source of truth. These
hypotheses, often involving the assertions of patriarchal law, function as obstacles that
require resolution. But that resolution involves more than simply a capitulation to the
extant power; indeed, what we might call the idiom of patriarchy requires to be
expanded and transformed in order to accommodate those energies that it seeks
initially to neutralise. To this extent comedy is frequently involved in a process of
cross-examination, deploying as it does a Socratic method whose momentum
simulates that of the progress of a law-suit. In its inclusivity, comedy resembles the
Hegelian dialectic insofar as it is concerned ultimately with epistemological questions
that inform the business of living in society.
Some recourse to a Hegelian historicism will be an important component of
the following arguments because it indicates that all human societies, and, indeed,
human activity generally, are defined by their histories, to the point where their
essences can only be understood through history as the operation of a temporal
dialectic. The relationship between Shakespearean comedy and the canonical law of
literary genre will be explored within this context. But close scrutiny will reveal that
far from resolving contradiction, the diacritical method that the following arguments
identify disclose, often involuntarily, an ontological undecidability that offers
momentary glimpses of other possibilities. In this way Shakespeare’s comic art
3
interrogates both the existing order, and the commonplace by occasionally (and
temporarily) propelling its audiences towards visions of alternative futures.
The social specificity of comedy acts as a counter to any claims to
universalism. Humour and laughter, the phenomenological effects of comedy, are
notoriously poor travellers as indicated by the nature of regional and geographically
specific jokes. The same might be said of the temporal dimension of comedy since
topicality is a constant trigger for humour. Moreover, the appearance of jokes and
comic interludes immediately following traumatic events, validate the process as a
means of ameliorating, if not purging, social anxiety. Elizabethan and Jacobean
culture and the comedies that they produced are of particular interest precisely
because of the traumatic and often perplexing paradigm shifts that were taking place
at the time. The anxieties that these shifts produced are recorded in historical
documents, but they are also theatrically represented in stage-plays, that, as historical
artefacts themselves encode at a domestic level these intense social concerns.
In Chapter 1 the choice of genre will be introduced as a source of historical
evaluation: that is to say, initial emphasis will be placed upon the dramatist’s
conscious endeavour to represent aesthetically intense socio-political upheaval from
within a particular frame of consciousness. A dramatist may enter into a form of
contract with an audience by declaring that a play belongs to one particular genre, but
the conventions of generic nomenclature are rarely as stable as this suggests, as
evidenced in the titular changes in the Comedies themselves. For example, the
interchangeability of the genres of ‘comedy’ and ‘history’ during the Elizabethan
period require some degree of articulation since both forms represent renewals of
social harmony that follow on from the disorder of a diseased body politic. In
focussing on the awareness that comedy is a kind of festive form of history, it is
4
necessary to trace initially the outline of Renaissance definitions of comedy that
emphasise the festive nature of the theatre as an institution.
C.L.Barber’s definition of comedy as “a kind of history”1 privileges an
historicist methodology that asserts an understanding of the original context of
reception. Barber’s view of comic history as “the kind that frames the mind to mirth”2
recalls Hayden White’s identification of comedy as an historical mode of
‘emplotment’ that uses the trope of synecdoche to integrate parts into a larger
historical whole where “struggle, strife, and conflict are dissolved in the realisation of
perfect harmony.” 3 Although the following arguments make little explicit use of
Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959) they do owe a debt of gratitude to his
study of the historical nature of Shakespearean comedy. His description of the fusing
together of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance theatrical traditions with early
modern forms of holiday festivity points towards the significance of ritual as “a
paradoxical human need, problem and resource.” 4 Barber’s work has subsequently
been taken up and developed by scholars such as Francois Laroque, and Naomi Conn
Liebler, 5 but he does not elaborate on the politics of race and gender that
contemporary criticism now recognises as an important element in Elizabethan and
Jacobean comedy.
The politics of comedy can be viewed with greater clarity as a result of the
juxtaposing of law and low culture, the sacred and the profane, or indeed the tragic
and comic elements of everyday experience. This is theorised and applied in Chapter
1 C.L.Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, (Princeton, 1959), p.12 2 Ibid. 3 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in CulturalCriticism, (Baltimore and London, 1985), pp.67-8 4 Op.cit., p.15 5 Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, (Cambridge, 1991), and Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, (New York and London,1995).
5
2 of this thesis through an analytical exploration of representative Shakespearean
comedies that betray a self-consciousness of their own generic classifications.
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1597) and Measure for Measure (1604) are
two plays that exemplify the conflict between comic and tragic modes. Identifying
moments of potential tragedy in these ‘dark’ comedies serves as a means of
positioning generic conflict as a structural principle that proves to be as important as
the plays’ comic themes of the conflict between genders. The process of resolution
with which both these plays are preoccupied, and their preoccupation with a quasi-
legalistic staging of conflict suggest an analogue with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
concept of the differend. Lyotard argues that the differend is a term he uses to identify
“the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that
reason a victim,” but he goes on to suggest that:
A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.6
Lyotard goes on to argue that the differend “is signalled by this inability to prove. The
one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps
the same one, is reduced to silence.” 7
The incompatibility of idioms, and the need to arbitrate cases, along with the
resultant negotiations that are brought into play, render the concept of the differend
more serviceable that Northrop Frye’s definition of the action of comedy as being one
that resembles a ‘law-suit’,8 since it can be argued that in this case aesthetic form
6 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, (Manchester, 1988), p.9 7 Ibid., p.10 8 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, (Princeton, 1957), p.166
6
constitutes a mode of intellectual enquiry that is capable of formulating alternatives to
any ideological imperative. This is not to say that art is a substitute for the
epistemological objectives of a philosophy, but rather to suggest that it can furnish a
knowledge that philosophy itself cannot. In short, it is the underside of philosophy in
just the same way that alternative meanings escape the straitjacket of ideological
form. What the dramatist does is to clarify the opposition between repression and
subversion and in doing so articulates what cannot be expressed. The discovery of the
means within critical discourse to articulate radical alternatives despite the constraints
imposed by a dominant ‘idiom’ replete with its linguistic, epistemological and
political prohibitions, is the motivation that lies behind the dialectical drive of this
thesis.
The proximity of the categories of the philosophical, the ethical and the
political to that of the aesthetic narrows, but does not obliterate entirely, the gap
between the philosophy of the human subject in law, and the dramatic persona subject
to the law that regulates genre. Each subject is subjected to a series of rules and
prohibitions; but the capacity of comedy to interrogate epistemological categories, to
cross-examine ‘reality’ results in a challenge to ontological certainty, producing a
radical undecidability that aggravates and disturbs notions of boundary and authority.
Such aggravations are generally relegated to the level of the cultural unconscious, but
the logic of the differend implies a source outside signification that can be identified
as a proximate origin of human creativity, and the starting point for a radical politics.
In his essay ‘Before the Law’ Derrida’s identification of the philosophy of law
as the means of generating moral, juridical and natural law is regarded as a fiction
whose main purpose is the narration of the prohibition of desire.9 In another essay,
9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, (New York and London, 1992), p.190
7
‘The Law of Genre’ the historicity of the law and the regulation of literary forms in
terms of the prohibitions placed upon the mixing of genres, are regarded as forms of
miscegenation. The second chapter of this thesis attempts to explore the Derridean
conception of the ascription of gender to genre, and pays particular attention to the
phallogocentric nature of the policing of boundaries. The hierarchical imbalance that
is involved in the process of governing, and carrying out surveillance on the
boundaries of the genre/gender divide, testifies to an anxiety generated by the fear of
monstrous or hybrid progeny. This fear is exorcised at a psychological level through
the taboo on incest, but it is also present in an analogous form in the critical
disapproval of the miscegenation of genres.
Chapter 2 tests the theoretical preference for a purity of aesthetic form in the
face of the differend that is performed in every comedy when comedy and tragedy are
forced to appear together on the Comic stage, and where one ‘idiom’ is enjoined to
accept the conditions of articulation of the other. Beneath the exclusions that both
proffer as a discursive restriction imposed upon the other lies a mutual dependency
that each denies the other but that they both need to accept. The refusal of each to
submit to the law of the other makes for the irresolution that Lyotard locates as the
matter of ‘dispute’, but in the comic resolution of conflict, say between different
generations who ostensibly speak different languages, there is an awareness of the
need to control the dominant discourse of the tragic in order to provide a resolution
that keeps the main characters alive and morally exemplary. The law of genre
demands that comedy must end happily, but because the differend can never be
completely resolved, the discriminations that it initiates resist synthesis, so that the
dialectic will always be imperfect. The negative term is always expelled from the
8
solution, or dealing with it is postponed, but it always returns as the excess that
escapes full signification.
In Shakespearean comedy the institution of marriage becomes a central trope,
and Chapter 3 engages with this as central to the thesis. Comedy and tragedy are
presented as culturally specific projections of human consciousness capable of
entertaining both forms as alternative representations. Within the ritual of marital
union psychology merges into symbol, and events frequently take on the logic of
dream, departing from the appearance of the everyday in order to articulate its inner
truth. Central to this symbolism is the figure of woman, who is simultaneously the
heart of life but who is also, within the Christian tradition, radically destructive, and
ultimately a path to redemption. This may be the reason why no masculine villain is
as evil as Goneril in King Lear or why no hero is as good as Portia in The Merchant of
Venice. What renders Shakespeare’s comic heroines so interesting is their capacity to
re-order society almost single-handedly. In such cases woman is the antithesis of a
male consciousness that is forced to move out of itself in order to confront a force
with which it must come to terms if the social order is to survive. This dialectic that is
played out between genders in the Comedies achieves a provisional resolution that is
an analogue of the Hegelian synthesis pressed into the service of a patriarchal model
of society in its returning of the potentially anarchic force of ‘woman’ to a
predominantly phallogocentric hierarchy.
Hegel demonstrates philosophically, and Shakespeare dramatically, that at the
heart of Christian doctrine lies the assertion that human life does not begin until
consciousness divides, and that this division and its articulation are the motor for
history itself and are what comprises the motion of existence. For Hegel human and
divine rationality are identical, and in accordance with the dictates of Enlightenment it
9
is assumed that Man’s reason is infinite in its capacity to contemplate, and control
existence. What for Hegel is a primary separation of Man from God, becomes for
Shakespeare the consequence of the creation of Eve. Woman becomes that which is
taken from Man and that causes his fall. She is wife and mother and threat: she is
forever ambiguous, untrustworthy, fecund, and ultimately redemptive. Viewed in this
way, then the tension between Man and Woman is articulated as a division of Man
from himself that can only be repaired at the end of Comedy through the institutional
ritual of marriage. This is the reason why Chapter 3 regards nuptial rites as the focal
point of any theoretical analysis of comedy. Here the importance of the Derridean
philosopheme of the hymen in addition to conceptualising the notions of union,
boundary and disruptive force10 also glosses the term as a symbol of female purity.
The questions of female purity and the fear of its violation are of direct relevance to
issues of propriety and authority. A consideration of the historicity of these concepts
is essential to an understanding of early modern comedy just as the Christian
distinction between woman as corrupter and redeemer, whore and virgin, are central
to an understanding of the identity of early modern woman.
The responsibility imposed upon the female gender as custodian both of male
sexual desire and the harmony of the entire social order is what troubles the
superficially happy resolutions of comedy. The all-male mode of production upon the
early modern stage may represent an important social ritual whereby division is
rendered whole, where a union of opposites, or the reconciliation of differences can
reasonably be anticipated. But the inversion of femininity by transvestite male actors
10 Throughout Spurs/Éperons, trans. Allan Bass, (Chicago, 1978), and the Double Session, Derrida figures the aporetic or the indeterminate vulvically as the hymen, as that which characterises “The general law of textual effect” (écriture), in direct opposition to the law of the phallus, or the desire for the apodictive or the determinate. These explicit gender identifications of the apodictic with the masculine and the aporetic with the feminine appear throughout Spurs as “That which will not be pinned down by truth is in truth – feminine”, p.55.
10
has been questioned as a male projection of how women should behave, even if these
were men imitating women imitating men. I will therefore argue that the double
negation of this theatrical practice helps to destabilise gender identity through an
explicit disclosure of the artificiality and performativity of gender construction; an
exposition that is as beneficial to men as it is to women.
Using Foucault’s analyses of the ‘technologies of sexuality’, the gender
identities represented in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605) and Middleton and
Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611) disclose an early modern preoccupation with the
cultural construction of gendered subjectivity, through descriptions of identity which
are formulated differentially in and through a range of social institutions, such as
marriage and the family. Comedies rarely end in actual marriage, however, as
anticipating marriage, progressing towards the ‘medicine of marriage’, describes
more accurately the teleological thrust of this dramatic form. This chapter therefore
interrogates C.L. Barber’s structuralist assumption that comedy performs ‘dramatic
epithalamia’ where “the power of love” is expressed “as a compelling rhythm in man
and nature”.11 The trope of marriage undoubtedly represents the inevitable and
irresistible force of an essentialist cosmic order where the regulation of libido
functions as a panacea for social disorder, and although the design of this prescriptive
force is concealed behind the appearance of social and cultural forms, its ideal reality
is destabilised by the ‘realist mimesis’ of comedy which ascribes to the symbolic form
of marriage a material existence. Applied specifically to the realm of early modern
comedy the implicitly sexual and the explicitly political investments made by the
social ritual of marriage can be effectively repositioned within the poetic sub-genre of
11 Barber, op. cit., p.9
11
the prothalamion where a new and stable future is evoked through the symbolic
economy of courtship.
This central chapter rotates the thesis on the axis of gender politics, as the
dialectic of desire further preoccupies those institutions designed to secure domination
and subjection. Proposing that the dramatic prothalamion of comic art has the capacity
to produce alternatives through which representation of the conflicts between these
complex forces is effected recalls Catherine Belsey’s description of the early modern
theatre’s capacity to disclose “meaning and the contests for meaning” within
particular institutions, such as marriage.12 This unremitting concern with the
regulation of human libido permits a liminal view of Renaissance society in which its
phallogocentrism is threatened by…
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