He does it under name of perfect love. (4.3.3–12)
One would say that Kate is growing up and beginning to experience the world for what it is. She never aroused the audience’s emotional reactions before, and we are beginning to feel sorry for her.
The peripeteia, or turn in the action, begins at the end of this scene. Petruchio seems to be carried away in his testing (or taming) of Kate to such an extent that he wants to control reality. He seems to contradict his wife, merely for sport, about what time it is:
It shall be seven ere I go to horse.
Look what I speak or do or think to do,
You are still crossing it. Sirs, let’t alone:
I will not go today, and ere I do,
It shall be what o’clock I say it is. (4.3.189–93)
All Kate said was “’tis almost two” (4.3.187).
This game of contradictions reaches its climax in act 4, scene 5. They are on the road to Padua to Kate’s father’s house, but Petruchio wants to triumph over Kate in every minute aspect of their relation and show her who is boss. Their dialogue is a delightful panoply of perverse suppositions:
Petruchio. Come on, a God’s name, once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon.
Kate. The moon? The sun. It is not moonlight now.
Petruchio. I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Kate. I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
Petruchio. Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon or star or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house. (4.5.1–8)
Petruchio seems here to have overplayed his role as master, and Hortensio gives Kate just the clue she needs to challenge him: “Say as he says or we shall never go” (4.5.11).
From here to the end of the play, Kate understands that being a wife is a social role that she must play according to conventional expectations. She now agrees with her husband: “Forward, I pray, since we have come so far, / And be it moon or sun or what you please” (4.5.12–13). Petruchio still wants to show his mastery—“I say it is the moon”—but Kate undercuts him by playing the marriage game of the obedient wife: “I know it is the moon” (4.5.16). Petruchio can no longer dictate the nature of reality to his cunning wife. It is no use for him to insist that “it is the blessèd sun” because Kate is ready to answer him in all of his mind games:
Then God be blessed, it is the blessèd sun.
But sun it is not when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine. (4.5.18–22)
Hortensio’s aside at this point is ambiguous: “Petruchio, go thy ways. The field is won” (4.5.23). Does this mean that Petruchio’s taming is now a complete success, or does it also mean that Kate has finally understood what is involved in playing the role of obedient wife? It looks as if, as Gremio observed earlier, “Petruchio is Kated” (3.2.245).
From here to the end of the play, Petruchio and Kate appear as a loving married couple, kissing and in good humor. In act 5, scene 2, they win an enormous wager based on whose wife will come promptly at her husband’s call. Surprisingly, Bianca and Lucentio and Hortensio and his widow lose this bet, although we certainly could not have predicted this at the beginning of the play. Kate’s long and submissive speech at the end of this scene is definitely not ironic. She means literally everything she says about the expected duties of an obedient, early English wife; in fact, she repeats conventional clichés from the marriage manuals:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign—one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience:
Too little payment for so great a debt. (5.2.146–54)
We don’t hear anything we don’t already know, but Kate takes the argument to its ultimate, physiological basis when she says:
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions [qualities] and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts? (5.2.165–68)
At the very end, her advice to Bianca and Hortensio’s widow is extraordinarily submissive:
Then vail your stomachs [pride], for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot,
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease. (5.2.176–79)
Kate makes sure not to leave anything out in her declaration of wifely obedience. She knows exactly what to say and how to play her part. Petruchio’s last speech begins: “Come, Kate, we’ll to bed” (5.2.184). Is their marriage finally consummated at this point? We don’t really know, but it is clear that Petruchio and his loving wife fare better than Sly and his supposed wife in the Induction.
Chapter 6
The Conventions of Romantic Love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early comedy, written shortly after The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labor’s Lost and, perhaps, after The Taming of the Shrew. It develops themes and aspects of romantic love that will be more fully and more successfully fulfilled in the comedies that follow, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. But Valentine and Proteus, the two gentlemen lovers of Verona, also strongly resemblance the disconsolate Romeo of the early part of Romeo and Juliet, a play that was written around the same time as The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Critics have objected to the artifice of the love action, particularly at the end of the play, when Proteus is so quickly forgiven for his perfidy and his friend, Valentine, is so carried away by the ideals of friendship: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee” (5.4.83). It is difficult to accept the fact that the play takes the conventions of romantic love so literally and so unnaturalistically. But Shakespeare is only following the lead of the innumerable italianate stories he had read, especially the Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana Enamorada (1542).
The devotion of Proteus to Julia is established in the first scene of the play, but his departing friend, Valentine, is contemptuous of romantic love: he calls it “fond [or foolish] desire” (1.1.52). After Valentine leaves the stage to depart for Milan, Proteus has a soliloquy that both celebrates being in love and expresses his awareness of its pains:
He after honor hunts, I after love.
He leaves his friends to dignify them more,
I leave myself, my friends, and all, for love.
Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphized me,
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War with good counsel, set the world at nought,
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought. (1.1.63–69)
It is almost as if Proteus agrees with his scornful friend about the dangers of love. This scene suggests that the play will take up the love versus friendship theme, but this topic is not fully developed in the course of the play.
In the next scene, Julia seems more fervently in love than Proteus. Even though she tears up his letter, she passionately seeks to recover the pieces. She comments petulantly: “Fie, fie, how wayward is this foolish love, / That, like a testy babe, will scratch the nurse, / And presently, all humbled, kiss the rod!” (1.2.57–59). There seems to be a persistent separation between the male and female lovers in Shakespeare’s comedies: the women are consistently more personal and more passionate.
Falling in love proceeds swiftly in this play. By the next scene, Valentine is suddenly in love with Silvia, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. His clown/ser
vant, Speed, offers a description of his love melancholy that looks forward to Romeo’s being smitten by Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet. Valentine, like his friend, Proteus, is now “metamorphized with a mistress” (2.1.31–32). Proteus’s word “metamorphized” is repeated from 1.1.66 so that the two lovers are represented symmetrically. Valentine has
learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a malcontent; to relish a love song, like a robin redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a schoolboy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch [stay awake], like one that fears robbing; to speak puling [complainingly], like a beggar at Hallowmas. (2.1.20–27)
This catalogue of the authentic signs of love melancholy will serve as a template for all Shakespeare’s comedies.
In his ardor for Silvia, Valentine as lover exceeds Proteus as lover of Julia, and it is interesting how the two gentlemen of Verona are developed as a matching pair. Valentine, the scoffer of love, is now doing
penance for contemning Love,
Whose high imperious thoughts have punished me
With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,
With nightly tears, and daily heartsore sighs;
For, in revenge of my contempt of Love,
Love hath chased sleep from my enthrallèd eyes,
And made them watchers of mine own heart’s sorrow. (2.4.129–35)
Love is personified—the god Cupid—as a “mighty lord” (2.4.136) who plays an active role in human affairs. In this early comedy, Shakespeare closely follows the conventions of romantic love. But even Proteus is astounded by the “braggardism” (2.4.164) of Valentine’s speech.
In this same scene, however, Proteus is suddenly madly in love with Valentine’s Silvia, which just goes to show how capricious and arbitrary love is. Act 2, scene 6 is devoted to Proteus’s long love soliloquy, which now outdoes Valentine’s declarations. Proteus is amply aware of his “threefold perjury” (2.6.5) to Julia and to Valentine, but an irresistible force drives him on:
Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose.
If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss
For Valentine, myself, for Julia, Silvia.
I to myself am dearer than a friend,
For love is still most precious in itself. (2.6.19–24)
Love shows his tyranny here because it leads to slandering Valentine and declaring that both Valentine and Julia are dead. Of course, Proteus’s vigorous protestations have no effect on the deep-sworn love of Silvia for Valentine.
In the final scene, Proteus goes beyond the conventions of romantic love in threatening to rape Silvia:
Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
Can no way change you to a milder form,
I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arms’ end,
And love you ’gainst the nature of love—force ye. (5.4.55–58)
Proteus sounds like the military Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece, but we are sure that rape can never be a part of a romantic love comedy. Valentine, now an exiled outlaw, is there to intervene. We are astonished at how quickly the apologetic Proteus is forgiven—and even more astonished at Valentine’s generosity: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee” (5.4.83). But, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all is beneficially sorted out, and the play ends happily. As Valentine declares in his final lines:
Come, Proteus; ’tis your penance but to hear
The story of your loves discoverèd.
That done, our day of marriage shall be yours;
One feast, one house, one mutual happiness. (5.4.171–74)
We are not meant to take seriously the many perturbations and betrayals that are entwined in the love action.
Chapter 7
The Portentous Tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy from Shakespeare’s mid-career. It is usually dated 1599, shortly before Hamlet. One of the first things we notice about the play is the abundance of rhyme, in couplets, quatrains (rhyming abab), and in a few fourteen-line sonnets. The frequent use of rhyme is associated with Shakespeare’s early comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The quantity of rhyming in Romeo and Juliet may be appropriate for its lyric presentation of love, but it still seems old-fashioned in relation to Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist.
The play also seems unusual in its opening Prologue, which carefully lays out the way the action will unfold. There is a strong emphasis on fate: “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes / A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” (0.5–6). Everything seems to depend on the longstanding feud between the Capulets and the Montagues rather than on the chosen destinies of the protagonists. Their love is “death-marked” (0.9) even before the play begins. There is a problem here for our understanding of Shakespearean tragedy, which must depend on free will and capacity for choice in individuals. We bridle at the idea that their fates are sealed and that they are doomed before the play even starts. That doesn’t seem very tragic. We could well ask if we need this Prologue (there is another Prologue before act 2). What function does it serve in the tragedy? At the end of the play, there is a kind of conclusion to the opening Prologue in what the Prince, old Capulet, and old Montague say (5.3.287f).
Romeo and Juliet opens like one of Shakespeare’s early comedies—The Comedy of Errors, for example—with elaborate and extended punning dialogue between Sampson and Gregory, servants of the house of Capulet. They are joined a bit further on by Abram and Balthasar, servants of the house of Montague. I quote the opening lines as a sample of the way the play begins:
Sampson. Gregory, on my word, we’ll not carry coals [submit to insults].
Gregory. No, for then we should be colliers.
Sampson. I mean, and [if] we be in choler, we’ll draw.
Gregory. Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar [hangman’s noose]. (1.1.1–5)
The style is unlike the kinds of plays Shakespeare was writing around this time.
At the entrance of Tybalt, of the house of Capulet, the quarrel suddenly turns threatening: “What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds? / Turn thee, Benvolio; look upon thy death” (1.168–69). Benvolio, a Montague, has been trying to prevent the servants from fighting. Notice how Tybalt, the swordsman, always speaks in a slightly ridiculous heroic style. “Heartless hinds” (“cowardly menials”) is an elevated phrase, hardly consonant with ordinary speech. As the play progresses, Tybalt seems to be the only one who takes the feud seriously and literally. When Romeo is at the Capulet ball, where he falls in love with Juliet, old Capulet doesn’t seem to mind his presence, but the fiery Tybalt is enflamed beyond measure:
What! Dares the slave
Come hither, covered with an antic face [Romeo’s mask],
To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?
Now, by the stock and honor of my kin,
To strike him dead I hold it not a sin. (1.5.57–61)
Tybalt, with his overwrought style, seems out of place in this enjoyable scene. Old Capulet is more than perturbed by his nephew’s aggressive behavior. He calls him “a saucy boy” (1.5.85) and a “princox” (1.5.88)—a strong word for a rude and impertinent adolescent (and used only this once in Shakespeare). Tybalt withdraws, but he predicts tragic consequences: “this intrusion shall, / Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall” (1.5.93–94).
From everything we can understand about the play, Tybalt seems to be at the heart of the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. In the first scene, he answers the peaceable Benvolio with swordsman’s rhetoric: “What, drawn, and talk of peace? I hate the word / As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. / Have at thee, coward!” (1.1.72–74). For a character who is so important in the development of the tragedy, Tybalt is represented as a ridiculous figure, which makes for an incongruity between cause and effect. In the crucial act 3, scene 1, where Mercu
tio is killed by Tybalt and the tragedy begins in earnest, Tybalt in Mercutio’s eyes is a blustering, pretentious over-actor. He answers Tybalt’s question, “What wouldst thou have with me?” (3.1.77), with comic disdain: “Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives” (3.1.78–79). He doesn’t see Tybalt as a serious threat, so it seems ironic that he should stab Mercutio to death, treacherously it would seem, while he is being held “under Romeo’s arm” (3.1.91 s.d.). Romeo is trying to prevent Mercutio from fighting.
Let us return again to the opening scene of the play, where the essential elements of the plot are introduced. There is a feeling of comedy in Romeo’s love melancholy, his hopeless relation with Rosaline (whom we never see). Romeo’s father speaks sympathetically about his stricken son, but also satirically, as do Benvolio, Mercutio, and all of Romeo’s friends. It is unmanly to moon and pine in love. Romeo’s speech is full of meaningless rhetorical flourishes, especially oxymorons, as he indulges himself in self-pity:
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh? (1.1.181–86)
Of course, Benvolio laughs at this bombardment of words. How could he help himself? But Romeo continues with more oxymorons about love (1.1.193–97). His verbal display is unstoppable. Romeo is cured of his love melancholy when he falls in love with Juliet at the Capulet ball (in 1.5)—love at first sight, of course, which is a comic convention.
But in the scene just before Romeo meets Juliet (1.4), he is already full of a portentous sense of doom and disaster. This seems incongruous to me, as if Romeo is speaking for the play and not for himself. Romeo’s speech comes right after Mercutio’s splendid set-piece on Queen Mab. Benvolio is urging Romeo to make haste to the Capulet ball for fear of coming too late. Romeo is troubled by dire thoughts:
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