Welcome to the Clubhouse, Litterbugs!  I’m back by popular dementia! You’re just in time for another installment of The Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  Thank you so much for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy your visit.


Today’s show takes a look at a couple of Shakespeare’s famous comedies, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, both written probably in 1599, that annus mirabilis for Shakespeare, which saw him composing not only these comedies, but Henry V, which we looked at last time, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet – now that’s a full working year, lad!.  For this little chat, I’d like to focus on the main female characters in the plays – Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado – not only because these women are interesting complements for one another, but also because they are among the strongest and most intelligent women ever to spring, Venus-like, fully formed from the balding head of Billy the Bard.


So, before we celebrate this Sisterhood of Wit and Wile, know that you can reach me at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  If you’re a fan of the social media, you can search “Classic English Literature Podcast” on any of them and treat yourself to cheeky little videos and podcast announcements.  Of course, you can make a financial contribution by clicking the Support the Show button.


Which leads me to a great big thank you to Terri V., our most recent donor.  Your gift will help me keep the lights on and the mike hot, not to mention it does me good to know that people are digging the podcast.  Thank you so much, Terri!


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Back in episode 47, the one about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I made bold with some references to Shakespeare having invented the romantic comedy, the rom-com.  Now, of course he didn’t literally, but his comedies do supply many of the tropes and conventions that the following centuries have adopted, adapted, and embroidered – never, shall I say, improved.  In today’s plays, especially Much Ado, Shakespeare gives us the archetype for all those comic leads Katherine Hepburn played in the 1930s and 40s – the sophisticated, witty, prickly, but ultimately tender, romantic object.  Think of films like Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Woman of the Year, and Adam’s Rib.  Or think about Rosalind Russell playing Hildy Johnson in Billy Wilder’s His Girl Friday.  Maybe we even can work our way backwards a bit and see Jane Austen’s women, especially Elizabeth Bennett, as indebted to the characters Shakespeare created in Beatrice and Rosalind. 



But while we may think of such characters as rom-com or screwball comedy staples, Shakespeare’s iterations are deeply complex and display an ambivalent attitude toward the gender conventions not only of early modern Europe, but of Western society today.


We are familiar, I imagine, with the pre-modern understanding of the ideal female: submissive, deferential, dependent, of low wisdom and intelligence, capricious, and irrational.  And while we publicly deplore such representations today, we still recognize their salience – especially in the realm of comedy.  So many jokes are predicated upon the audience understanding particular assumptions about gender or race or religion or whatever.  Generally, such stereotypes are invoked today only to be subverted.  And that is what, on the whole, the characters of Beatrice and Rosalind do in these plays – they subvert anti-female assumptions while asserting their own agency.


Sort of.


You can start a bar fight by making any statement about Shakespeare’s portrayal of women – well, it does depend upon the kind of bar you go to and the patrons’ commitment to feminist analyses of Elizabethan drama – but if you’re in such a bar, just watch what you say.  You could be looking at some Star Wars cantina-level aggression.  


Some, such as me, full disclosure, see Shakespeare’s female characters as endlessly rich and complex, without ignoring the fact that they often reveal certain prejudices of the time.  Of course, one can quantitatively point out that Bill just doesn’t give his women enough stage time, that men do most of the talking.  And, yeah, that’s really true.  His largest male role, Hamlet, has some 1500 lines, while his largest female role has less than half that at 721.  That role belongs to Rosalind.


Here’s the part where I’d usually give a brief summary of As You Like It’s plot.  Columbia University professor James Shapiro calls it a “relatively plotless drama.” In a lecture by Oxford University’s Emma Smith, she asks “What happens in As You Like It?,” and the answer she initially offers is “not much.”  But I think that too quick and dirty, don’t you?  That’s more fast and filthy.  Here is something of the plot to this rather plotless play that, nonetheless, as Shapiro says, has “a great going on . . . and on many levels.”


Duke Frederick has banished his brother Duke Senior, who lives with his exiled court in the Forest of Arden.  Senior’s daughter Rosalind still lives at Frederick’s court with Celia, her great friend.  One day, there’s a wrestling match and Rosalind falls for the victor, Orlando, after he maneuvers a spladle and a suplex, then she misses a crossface, he gives her a leg sweep and she gets pinned.  No, she falls in love with him.


But Duke Frederick doesn’t want Orlando around, nor Rosalind for that matter, so the latter runs into the forest searching for her love – and what better way to seduce a wrestler than with a bit of cross-dressing?  Rosalind decides she must disguise herself as a young man called Ganymede to protect herself from the predations of unsavory men.  Celia comes as a shepherdess called Aliena (get it? Alien-a? like an outsider?).  Now, we’re getting some serious pastoral vibes.


And, like much of the pastoral literature we’ve already discussed (that of Sir Phillip Sidney in episode 35 and Edmund Spenser in 37.  The eclogues of episodes 40 and 41) – nothing much happens.  We are treated to a surfeit of apparently random encounters in the Forest of Arden and there’s a lot of talk about wanting things to happen, a lot of preparatory fretting about impending or imminent happenings, but that’s really it.  Yes, Orlando vandalizes the forest with  some pretty goopy love poetry for Rosalind. There’s a subplot involving real shepherd and shepherdess Silvius and Phoebe (stock pastoral names), Duke Senior’s courtier Jaques offers some melancholy observations about the vanity of vanities (including the brilliant, but rather dramatically decelerating “Seven Ages of Man” speech: “All the world's a stage,  And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts” and so on.


And the god Hymen emcees a quadruple wedding at the end just before a startlingly blunt use of deus ex machina (so blunt, in fact, I am convinced Billy the Bard is taking the piss). Even a wrestling bout with a lioness fails to charge the story.


Now, don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying the play is boring or a failure. Heaven forfend!  This is Shakespeare!   All I’m saying is that the plot is not really why we’re here.  We’re watching a pastoral poem play out before us.  And, if I’m honest, like most pastoral poems, it’s the female character who’s the most interesting.  


And that the female character here spends most of her time as a male character (named for Zeus’ mythical cupbearer and catamite) affords interesting opportunities for exploring gender.  Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: yes, the comic possibilities abound – drag comedy has a long history in Anglophone theatre: think only of Monty Python’s Pepperpot characters or Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna.  We do get the added layer of irony when we recall that in the Elizabethan theatre, all female roles were performed by young men or boys – though, contrary to popular understanding, this was a matter of professional convention and not of the law.  It wasn’t illegal for women to be on the stage – it simply wasn’t done.  Anyway, in the cross-dressing trope, we have a male actor impersonating a female character impersonating a male character.  Comedy gold.


But here, we get Rosalind seducing Orlando as a man once again pretending to be a woman.  Ganymede says he can soothe Orlando’s longing if Orlando will think of Ganymede as Rosalind: “I would cure you if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.”  You don’t have to be Freud to get the subtext here, yeah?


And while Shakespeare had the plausible deniability of music hall hijinks, Orlando seems willing to do some man-to-man wooing.  He’s not shocked or stunned at the idea – and really, would “pretend I’m a girl” work anyway? As in Richard Barnfield’s pastoral poem “The Affectionate Shepherd” (see episode 41), I think we really see an early portrayal of queer love here, or attraction, at any rate.


Rosalind’s concern for the realities or constructions of gender begin early in the play.  One lazy day, she speaks with cousin Celia:





Rosalind chides Fortune for the perceived inferiority of women. Indeed, Celia herself reduces femaleness to the poles of beauty and virtue.  But Rosalind asserts that Nature would not have had it so.  Yet, after her banishment, she does lament, “I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman; but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as

doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.”  A tacit affirmation of manly fortitude over womanly weeping, but do note that Rosalind uses the clothing metonym to highlight the rather superficial and concealing nature of such conventions.


Here’s another interesting scene; it feels like a telescoped line from a sonnet.  Here’s a 1964 performance by the Shakespeare Recording Company.  Rosalind/Ganymede asks Orlando:


Now tell me how long you would have her after you have possessed her.


Orlando

Forever and a day.


Rosalind

Say ‘a day’, without the ‘ever’. No, no, Orlando. Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry. I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.


Orlando

But will my Rosalind do so?


Rosalind

By my life, she will do as I do.


Orlando

O, but she is wise.


Rosalind

Or else she could not have the wit to do this: the wiser, the waywarder. Make the doors upon a woman’s wit and it will out at the casement. Shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole. Stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.



Note Rosalind’s wisdom, or maturity, or realism here.  She so sounds like the beloved in Spenser’s Amoretti, taming the whirlwind fantasy of her lover, bringing it down to nature after the first flush of fortune, but all the while madly in love as well.  We relish the irony of “she will do as I do” and Rosalind comments that a wise woman is wayward.  Of course, here’s one dressed as a man explaining the real world of love to a daft lover in the forest.  


She does it again when in conversation with Oliver, Orlando’s prickly brother.  She believes that Orlando has lost his battle with the lioness and faints away:



Oh, so many levels here, huh?  Wheels within wheels.  The key irony here, though, is the counterfeiting toward authenticity, and it’s interesting that Rosalind says “a body would think this was well counterfeited,” rather than “someone would think” or “didn’t you think.”  There’s an emphasis on the physical, the corporeal.


Men don’t faint; men don’t show fear or worry. Rosalind keeps arguing for these stereotypes in her portrayal of a man, while Oliver presses her to tell the truth about the swoon.  But, rightfully – by right – Rosalind should be allowed to be authentically herself.


While Rosalind is certainly a courtly woman, in the forest she becomes more “natural,” ironically at first through the portrayal of male fortune, but acquiesces to the established order of things as the court is restored.  To both the Duke her father and Orlando, her husband, she repeats: To you I give myself, for I am yours.  Do we see this as an act of agency, her free choice of love both filial and erotic?  Or is it mere accommodation?  I don’t know.  But I like her jaunty epilogue in which she continues to tease assumptions about sex and gender.


That sense of a gendered authenticity provides a nice pivot to the other star of today’s show, Beatrice, from Much Ado About Nothing.  While Rosalind’s milieu becomes the forest, with connotations of natural liberty and perhaps wildness, Beatrice’as milieu is the Italian villa, a place of cultivation, an idealized simulacrum of ordered Arcadia.


First, a quick and dirty.


Returning from the wars, Count Claudio stops at a villa and falls in love with Hero, the daughter of his host, Leonato. Claudio’s friend Benedick, who has sworn never to marry, accompanies him and eventually he and Hero's cousin Beatrice (who has similarly sworn) and Benedict (an eternal bachelor) are tricked into believing that the other is in love with them. The villain, Don John,deceives Claudio, who then believes Hero has had sex in a window (which is, of course, a precarious undertaking . What’s a girl to do but swoon at such calumny? Everyone believes she is dead, but she's not, don’t worry.  But Claudio is wracked with guilt – as well he should be, the shallow pup – and for his penance must agree to marry someone else.  The mysterious bride enters veiled and who does she turn out to be?  If you said Hero, you’re right! Benedick wins Beatrice’s love for defending Hero’s honour, and the two couples unite in eternal nuptial bliss.  Ends just like a comedy should: marriages all round, defeated villains, stability restored.


From that quick plot sketch, it seems that the Claudio/Hero couple is the main event, with Beatrice and Benedick fighting on the undercard.  But, of course, Claudio and Hero are really two-dimensional characters – they are props for a certain conception of gender and marriage.  Claudio is kind of vapid, really, a cartoon romantic hero, and Hero is the very card and calendar of the Elizabethan good girl – all timid virtue and sighing.  Beatrice comments, 


Yes, faith, it is my cousin’s duty to make

 curtsy and say “Father, as it please you.” But yet for

 all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or

 else make another curtsy and say “Father, as it

 please me.”


As might be surmised by Beatrice’s urging Hero to assert her own desires, the down-ticket couple is the more interesting – in fact, the play was often presented as “Beatrice and Benedick” as that was the attraction for audiences.  In the run-up to Hero’s defamation, they engage in the kind of verbal sparring that would inspire Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night” – a “skirmish of wit” as Uncle Leonato calls it.  Here is one of their early sparrings from a 1960 production of the Dublin Gate Theatre:



BEATRICE

  

I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior

 Benedick, nobody marks you.


BENEDICK

  What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet

 living?


BEATRICE

  Is it possible disdain should die while she

 hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

 Courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come

 in her presence.


BENEDICK

  Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain

 I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and

 I would I could find in my heart that I had not a

 hard heart, for truly I love none.


BEATRICE

A dear happiness to women. They would

 else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I

 thank God and my cold blood I am of your humor

 for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow

 than a man swear he loves me.


BENEDICK

  God keep your Ladyship still in that mind,

 so some gentleman or other shall ’scape a predestinate

 scratched face.


BEATRICE

  Scratching could not make it worse an

 ’twere such a face as yours were.


BENEDICK

  Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.


BEATRICE

  A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of

 yours.


BENEDICK

  I would my horse had the speed of your

 tongue and so good a continuer, but keep your

 way, i’ God’s name, I have done.


BEATRICE

  You always end with a jade’s trick. I know

 you of old.


By my count, there are about a dozen and a half examples of classical rhetorical devices in this exchange: obvious things, perhaps like the metaphor “courtesy is a turncoat”  or the sarcasm of “a dear happiness to women.”  But there are subtler and more elegant strategies at work here, too.  For instance, Beatrice's antithetical statement, "A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours," contrasts the qualities of her own verbal skills with the perceived lack of eloquence in Benedick.  And Beatrice's exclamation, "I wonder that you will still be talking," utilizes litotes, a form of understatement, to express her surprise or annoyance at Benedick's continuous blather.  


What I wish to point out here is the cultivated nature of Beatrice’s wit and intelligence, the sense that it has been consciously nurtured and developed, in a subtle contrast to Rosalind’s more merry and spontaneous seeming wit.  This is not to say that Beatrice is not “naturally” witty or intelligent, but rather that she has disciplined her mental and verbal acuity. And she is a bit precious about it, too.  Nothing Benedick says to her needles her as much as his insinuation that she gets her lines from a joke book: “that I was disdainful, and that I had my good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales!  Well, this was Signior Benedick that said so.”


Her self-hood and agency are so circumscribed in this world, her woman’s body potential chattel, that she guards the sanctity of her mind, refusing to submit intellectually: 


Would it not grieve a woman to be

overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make

an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?


She, of course, alludes here to the creation of Man from the book of Genesis: “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.”  But when she compounds the dust reference, using the word “marl” – which is a mixture of lime and clay used for fertilizer – she hints at her anxieties posed by such overmastery.  Think perhaps of birdlime, that sticky substance used to trap birds.


And so, as Bendick says, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs.”  Unlike Rosalind, Beatrice’s wit is a weapon.


But I see it as more defensive than offensive – I mean, not literally.  Yes, sometimes Beatrice does start the fight, but there feels like a vulnerability which necessitates pre-emptive strikes.  For instance, her first line in the play – “I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?” – asks for Benedick while simultaneously scorning him and, since “mountanto” refers to an upward thrust in fencing, being wary of the potential for sexual or emotional threat.  Remember her last line in the longer exchange above?  She tells him, “I know you of old.”   In a conversation with the Prince, she explains how she lost Benedick’s heart: “Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single  one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice.”  Seems that these two did have a romantic, perhaps sexual, relationship at some time in the past, and that it ended so traumatically that both have sworn to celibacy, and done so in rather in language loaded with misogyny and, albeit to a less troubling extent, misandry. 


Because of the vulnerability.  Since we often take the play at its word – this is all much ado about nothing, a bit of frivolous entertainment – it is easy to overlook the deeply troubling problem of female shaming and disgrace.  The much commented upon pun of that title – “nothing” being Elizabethan slang for the vulva and, less frequently, the penis – the play is a big kerfuffle about sex.  But not in the way of those screwball comedy films I keep insisting on referencing. Film critic Andrew Sarris called the screwball comedy "a sex comedy without the sex." And if we accept that notion, my analogy breaks down.  Because while we don’t see any actual copulation on stage (well, depending on how one presents Margaret in the window with Borachio), the social ramifications of the sexual act are absolutely what the Hero/Claudio plot is about, and it’s where the Beatrice/Benedick subplot fully intersects.


Claudio’s public denunciation of Hero horrifies with its bile, and absolutely halts the action of a comedy:


 There, Leonato, take her back again.

 Give not this rotten orange to your friend.

 She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor.

 Behold how like a maid she blushes here!

 O, what authority and show of truth

 Can cunning sin cover itself withal!

 Comes not that blood as modest evidence

 To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,

 All you that see her, that she were a maid,

 By these exterior shows? But she is none.

 She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.

 Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.


The rest of the scene contains similar calumny, all based upon the generally accepted notion of female wantonness and infidelity, covered over with deceptive appearances.  Note Claudio’s use of the words sign, semblance, exterior shows.  The two false comparisons to a maid.

All Hero can do is swoon – the female is powerless to defend her honor.  And that word, Falstaff’s mere scutcheon, is used throughout the play as the highest of male virtues, but only once to refer to Hero’s destruction, and even then (the speech is Leonato’s, by the way) it is used in the conditional – if Claudio and Don John have wronged her honor – and almost an afterthought: Hero’s father says he will “tear” her if what they charge is true.


It seems to me, then, that masculine honor is quite a fragile thing and, in this story, is predicated upon a feminine honor presupposed to be all but nonexistent.  It’s also probably worth noting the numerous examples of male inconstancy and infidelity referenced throughout the play, but which are invisible to the male characters as such, a version of that double-standard which sees the over-sexed man as heroic but the over-sexed woman as sluttish.  And surely the slut has no honor to defend.


So when Beatrice demands that Bendick prove his love by avenging Hero – “Kill Claudio” – she gives vent to an understandable wrath, while seemingly endorsing the very social conventions that have condemned her cousin.  Here are two key speeches, the first in response to Benedick asking whether Claudio is really Beatrice’s enemy:


Is he not approved in the height a villain

 that hath slandered, scorned, dishonored my kinswoman?

 O, that I were a man! What, bear her in

 hand until they come to take hands, and then, with

 public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated

 rancor—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his

 heart in the marketplace.


She implies here that honorable vengeance is denied the woman – for her natural weakness and her inconstancy – despite the fact that Claudio’s accusations would demand satisfaction were a man’s honor impugned.  Eating his heart in the marketplace – well, that’s just badass.


Here’s the other:


Princes and counties! Surely a princely testimony,

 a goodly count, Count Comfect, a sweet

 gallant, surely! O, that I were a man for his sake! Or

 that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!

 But manhood is melted into curtsies, valor into

 compliment, and men are only turned into tongue,

 and trim ones, too. He is now as valiant as Hercules

 that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man

 with wishing; therefore I will die a woman with

 grieving.


In her rage, Beatrice’s verbal dexterity has not abandoned her.  The rhetorical flourishes which begin this speech soon shift into a more temperate condemnation of contemporary manhood – of the kind we saw disparaged by Richard III and in the Henry plays.  Masculinity is now a pose, an appearance, a role – what Rosalind pointed out in a lighter way.  It has abandoned its force and merely become courtly, a tissue of lies.


It’s this that discharges any claims of hypocrisy on Beatrice’s part.  When she rages, “O, that I were a man” again and again, we’re not supposed to understand that she endorses traditional masculine privilege generally – rather that she laments her powerlessness, resents the double-standard, and finally recognizes it as a fiction – albeit a powerful one that condemns women to death through ignominy and grief.



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There is a temptation, especially among fans of Shakespeare, to find in him some early avatar of our own values and beliefs.  We may want to see Shakespeare’s two most intelligent and perceptive women as evidence of his proto-feminism, his solution to the “battle of the sexes.”  But we must admit, I think, that while the generic demands of comedy necessitate marriage, the prospects for long-term success in the marriages of Rosalind and Orlando and Beatrice and Benedick are not self-evident.  Yes, the plays have happy endings, but is Orlando too callow for Rosalind’s energy, is Beatrice too – well, jaded seems an exaggeration – but is she really going to subordinate herself to a man for the rest of her life?  Weddings are the ends of comedies, but these women are too fully human to recede into “happily ever after” comic tropes.


Capacious as his mind was and intimate as his understanding of human nature is, we should never seek for answers in Shakespeare.  He defies such reductionism.  His work asks questions and presents human responses to them without the need to settle on any single position.  He possesses, as John Keats noted in 1817, “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  Beatrice and Rosalind dwell in the midst of competing definitions and expectations of women – natural and civil – without being reduced to a type or an exemplar.  In the all too binary, oppositional, either/or thinking that undergirds much commentary and critique, his characters are never one or the other, they are always both and usually much in between as well.  And that, to me, is a far more profound statement on gender, culture, and politics than any mere “message.”


Thanks for listening today, I hope I have spent your time well.  Drop a line with any questions or suggestions.  Follow the podcast on your favorite social network.  Please, if you can, leave a positive review on your platform – the Almighty Algorithm will be pleased and spread the word to others. And, of course, I never mind a little cash, so if you’ve some some to spare, hit the support button.


Be well, everybody.