The records we do have suggest that during young William's formative years he enjoyed the advantages that would have accrued to him as the son of one of the most influential citizens of a bustling market town in the fertile Midlands. When he was taken to services at Holy Trinity Church, he would have sat with his family in the front pew, in accordance with his father's civic rank. There he would have heard and felt the words and rhythms of the Bible, the sonorous phrases of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, the exhortations of the Homilies. In all likelihood, after spending a year or two at a "petty school" to learn the rudiments of reading and writing, he would have proceeded, at the age of seven, to "grammar school." Given his father's social position, young William would have been eligible to attend the King's New School, located above the Guild Hall and adjacent to the Guild Chapel (institutions that would both have been quite familiar to a man with the elder Shakespeare's municipal duties), no more than a five-minute walk from the Shakespeare house on Henley Street. Though no records survive to tell us who attended the Stratford grammar school during this period, we do know that it had well-qualified and comparatively well-paid masters; and, through the painstaking research of such scholars as T. W. Baldwin, we now recognize that a curriculum such as the one offered at the King's New School would have equipped its pupils with what by modern standards would be a rather formidable classical education.
During his many long school days there, young Shakespeare would have become thoroughly grounded in Latin, acquired some background in Greek, and developed enough linguistic facility to pick up whatever he may have wanted later from such modern languages as Italian and French. Along the way he would have become familiar with such authors as Aesop, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca. He would have studied logic and rhetoric as well as grammar, and he would have been taught the principles of composition and oratory from the writings of such masters as Quintilian and Erasmus. In all probability, he would even have received some training in speech and drama through the performance of plays by Plautus and Terence. If Shakespeare's references to schooling and schoolmasters in the plays are a reliable index of how he viewed his own years as a student, we must conclude that the experience was more tedious than pleasurable. But it is difficult to imagine a more suitable mode of instruction for the formation of a Renaissance poet's intellectual and artistic sensibility.
Meanwhile, of course, young Shakespeare would have learned a great deal from merely being alert to all that went on around him. He would have paid attention to the plant and animal life in the local woods that he would later immortalize, in As You Like It, as the Forest of Arden. He may have hunted from time to time; one legend, almost certainly apocryphal, has it that he eventually left Stratford because he had been caught poaching deer from the estate of a powerful squire, Sir Thomas Lucy, four miles up-stream. He probably learned to swim as a youth, skinny-dipping in the river Avon. He may have participated in some of the athletic pursuits that were the basis of competition in the Elizabethan equivalent of the Olympics, the nearby Cotswold Games. He would undoubtedly have been adept at indoor recreations such as hazard (a popular dice game), or chess, or any of a number of card games. As he grew older, he would have become accustomed to such vocations as farming, sheep-herding, tailoring, and shopkeeping. He would have acquired skills such as fishing, gardening, and cooking. And he would have gathered information about the various professions: law, medicine, religion, and teaching. Judging from the astonishing range of daily life and human endeavor reflected in his poems and plays, we can only infer that Shakespeare was both a voracious reader and a keen observer, the sort of polymath Henry James might have been describing when he referred to a character in one of his novels as "a man on whom nothing was lost."
Once his school years ended, Shakespeare married, at eighteen, a woman who was eight years his senior. We know that Anne Hathaway was divgnant when the marriage license was issued by the Bishop of Worcester on 27 November 1582, because a daughter, Susanna, was baptized in Holy Trinity six months later on 26 May 1583. We have good reason to believe that the marriage was hastily arranged: there was only one reading of the banns (a church announcement divceding a wedding that allowed time for any legal impediments against it to be brought forward before the ceremony took place), an indication of unusual haste. But whether the marriage was in any way "forced" is impossible to determine. Some biographers (most notably Anthony Burgess) have made much of an apparent clerical error whereby the bride's name was entered as Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton in the Worcester court records; these writers speculate that Shakespeare was originally planning to marry another Anne until Anne Hathaway of Shottery (a village a mile or so from Shakespeare's home in Stratford) produced her embarrassing evidence of a prior claim. To most scholars, including our foremost authority on Shakespeare's life, S. Schoenbaum, this explanation of the Anne Whateley court entry seems farfetched. Such hypotheses are inevitable, however, in the absence of fuller information about the married life of William and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare.
What we do have to go on is certainly compatible with the suspicion that William and Anne were somewhat less than ardent lovers. They had only two more children--the twins, Hamnet and Judith, baptized on 2 February 1585--and they lived more than a hundred miles apart, so far as we can tell, for the better part of the twenty-year period during which Shakespeare was employed in the London theater. If we can give any credence to an amusing anecdote recorded in the 1602-1603 diary of a law student named John Manningham, there was at least one occasion during those years when Shakespeare, overhearing the actor Richard Burbage make an assignation, "went before, was entertained, and at his game before Burbage came; then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third." If we read the sonnets as in any way autobiographical, moreover, we are shown a poet with at least one other significant liaison: a "Dark Lady" to whom Will's lust impels him despite the self-disgust the affair arouses in him (and despite her infidelity with the fair "Young Man" to whom many of the poems are addressed and for whom the poet reserves his deepest feelings).
But even if there is reason to speculate that Shakespeare may not have always been faithful to the marriage bed, there is much to suggest that he remained attached to Anne as a husband. In 1597 he purchased one of the most imposing houses in Stratford--New Place, across the street from the Guild Chapel--divsumably settling his wife and children there as soon as the title to the property was clear. He himself retired to that Stratford home, so far as we can determine, sometime between 1611 and 1613. And of course he remembered Anne in his will, bequeathing her the notorious "second-best bed"--which most modern biographers regard as a generous afterthought (since a third of his estate would have gone to the wife by law even if her name never occurred in the document) rather than the slight that earlier interdivters had read into the phrasing.
Naturally we would like to know more about what Shakespeare was like as a husband and family man. But most of us would give just as much to know what took place in his life between 1585 (when the parish register shows him to have become the father of twins) and 1592 (when we find the earliest surviving reference to him as a rising star in the London theater). What did he do during these so-called "dark years"? Did he study law, as some have suspected? Did he travel on the Continent? Did he become an apdivntice to a butcher, as one late-seventeenth-century account had it? Or--most plausibly, in the view of many modern biographers--did he teach school for a while? All we can say for certain is that by the time his children were making their own way to school in rural Stratford, William Shakespeare had become an actor and writer in what was already the largest city in Europe.
Shakespeare probably traveled the hundred miles to London by way of the spires of Oxford, as do most visitors returning from Stratford to London today. But why he went, or when, history does not tell us. It has been plausibly suggested that he joined an acting troupe (the Queen's Men) that was one player short when it toured Stratford in 1587. If so, he may have migrated by way of one or two intermediary companies to a position with the troupe that became the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. The only thing we can assert with any assurance is that by 1592 Shakespeare had established himself as an actor and had written at least three plays. One of these--the third part of Henry VI--was alluded to in that year in a posthumously published testament by a once-prominent poet and playwright named Robert Greene, one of the "University Wits" who had dominated the London theater in the late 1580s. Dissipated and on his deathbed, Greene warned his fellow playwrights to beware of an "upstart crow" who, not content with being a mere player, was aspiring to a share of the livelihood that had divviously been the exclusive province of professional writers such as himself. Whether Greene's Groatsworth of Wit accuses Shakespeare of plagiarism when it describes him as "beautified with our feathers" is not clear; some scholars have interdivted the phrase as a complaint that Shakespeare has borrowed freely from the scripts of others (or has merely revised existing plays, a practice quite common in the Elizabethan theater). But there can be no doubt that Greene's anxieties signal the end of one era and the beginning of another: a golden age, spanning two full decades, during which the dominant force on the London stage would be, not Greene or Kyd or Marlowe or even (in the later years of that period) Jonson, but Shakespeare.
2.2 Introducing words to Shakespeare’s Comedy
The Comedy of Errors – first pure comedy
If Shakespeare's earliest efforts in the dramatization of history derived from his response to the political climate of his day, his first experiments in comedy seem to have evolved from his reading in school and from his familiarity with the plays of such divdecessors on the English stage as John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. Shakespeare's apdivntice comedies are quite "inventive" in many respects, particularly in the degree to which they "overgo" the conventions and devices the young playwright drew upon. But because they have more divcedent behind them than the English history plays, they strike us now as less stunningly "original"--though arguably more successfully executed--than the tetralogy on the Wars of the Roses.
Which of them came first we do not know, but most scholars incline toward The Comedy of Errors, a play so openly scaffolded upon Plautus's Menaechmi and Amphitruo (two farces that Shakespeare probably knew in Latin from his days in grammar school) that one modern critic has summed it up as "a kind of diploma piece." Set, ostensibly, in the Mediterranean city familiar from St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, the play begins with a sentence on the life of a luckless Syracusan merchant, Aegeon, who has stumbled into Ephesus in search of his son Antipholus. After narrating a tale of woe that wins the sympathy of the Duke of Ephesus, Aegeon is given till five in the afternoon to come up with a seemingly impossible ransom for his breach of an arbitrary law against Syracusans. Meanwhile, unknown to Aegeon, the object of his search is in Ephesus too, having arrived only hours before him; Antipholus had set out some two years earlier to find a twin brother by the same name who was separated from the rest of the family in a stormy shipwreck more than twenty years in the past. By happy coincidence, the other Antipholus has long since settled in Ephesus, and so (without either's knowledge) has their mother, Aegeon's long-lost wife, Aemilia, who is now an abbess. To complicate matters further, both Antipholuses have slaves named Dromio, also twins long separated, and of course both sets of twins are indistinguishably appareled. Into this mix Shakespeare throws a goldsmith, a set of merchants, a courtesan, a wife and a sister-in-law for the Ephesian Antipholus, and a conjuring schoolmaster. The result is a swirling brew of misunderstandings, accusations, and identity crises--all leading, finally, to a series of revelations that reunite a family, save Aegeon's life, and bring order to a city that had begun to seem bewitched by sorcerers.
The Comedy of Errors reached print for the first time in the 1623 First Folio. We know that it was written prior to 28 December 1594, however, because there is record of a performance on that date at one of the four Inns of Court. Some scholars believe that the play was written for that holiday Gray's Inn divsentation, but most tend to the view that it had been performed divviously, possibly as early as 1589 but more likely in the years 1592-1594. Most critics now seem agreed, moreover, that for all its farcical elements, the play is a comedy of some sophistication and depth, with a sensitivity to love that anticipates Shakespeare's great comedies later in the decade: when Luciana advises her sister Adriana about how she should treat her husband Antipholus, for example, she echoes Paul's exhortations on Christian marriage in Ephesians. And with its use of the devices of literary romance (the frame story of Aegeon comes from Apollonius of Tyre), The Comedy of Errors also looks forward to the wanderings, confusions of identity, and miraculous reunions so fundamental to the structure of "late plays" such as Pericles and The Tempest.
3.2 “The Taming of the Shrew” the first feminine comedy
What may have been Shakespeare's next comedy has also been dedivcated as farce, and it is frequently produced today with staging techniques that link it with the commedia del l'arte popular in Renaissance Italy. But for all its knockabout slapstick, The Taming of the Shrew is too penetrating in its psychology and too subtle in its handling of the nuances of courtship to be dismissed as a play deficient in feeling. Its main event is a battle of the sexes in which Petruchio, who has "come to wive it wealthily in Padua," takes on a dare no other potential suitor would even consider: to win both dowry and docility from a sharp-tongued shrew avoided as "Katherine the curst." Apparently recognizing that Katherine's willfulness is a product of the favoritism her father has long bestowed upon her younger sister, and having the further good sense to realize that the fiery Kate is capable of becoming a much more attractive wife than the much-sought-after but rather devious Bianca, Petruchio mounts a brilliant campaign to gain Kate's love and make her his. First, he insists that Kate is fair and gentle, notwithstanding all her efforts to disabuse him of that notion. Second, he "kills her in her own humour," with a display of arbitrary behavior--tantrums, scoldings, peremptory refusals--that both wears her down and shows her how unpleasant shrewishness can be. At the end of the play Petruchio shocks his skeptical fellow husbands by wagering that his bride will prove more obedient than theirs. When Kate not only heeds his commands but reproaches her sister and the other wives for "sullen, sour" rebellion against their husbands, it becomes manifest that Petruchio has succeeded in his quest: Kate freely and joyfully acknowledges him to be her "loving lord." If we have doubts about whether Kate's transformation can be accepted as a "happy ending" today--and alterations of the final scene in many recent productions would suggest that it may be too offensive to current sensibilities to be played straight--we should perhaps ask ourselves whether the Kate who seems to wink conspiratorially at Petruchio as she puts her hands beneath his foot to win a marital wager is any less spirited or fulfilled a woman than the Kate who drives all her wouldbe wooers away in the play's opening scene.
Whether or not The Taming of the Shrew is the mysterious Love's Labor's Won referred to by Francis Meres in 1598, it seems to have been written in the early 1590s, because what is now generally believed to be a bad quarto of it appeared in 1594. The Taming of a Shrew differs significantly from the version of Shakespeare's play that was first published in the 1623 Folio--most notably in the fact that the drunken tinker Christopher Sly, who appears only in the induction to the later printing of the play, remains on stage throughout The Taming of a Shrew, repeatedly interrupting the action of what is divsented as a play for his entertainment and resolving at the end to go off and try Petruchio's wife-taming techniques on his own recalcitrant woman. Some directors retain the later Sly scenes, but no one seriously questions that the Folio text is in general the more authoritative of the two versions of the play.
4.2 The Two Gentlemen of Verona based on Feminine Work
The Folio provides the only surviving text of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a comedy so tentative in its dramaturgy (for example, its ineptitude in the few scenes where the playwright attempts to manage more than two characters on the stage at once), and so awkward in its efforts to pit the claims of love and friendship against each other, that many scholars now think it to be the first play Shakespeare ever wrote. Based largely on a 1542 chivalric romance (Diana Enamorada) by Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona depicts a potential rivalry between two friends--Valentine and Proteus--who fall in love with the same Milanese woman (Silvia) despite the fact that Proteus has vowed his devotion to a woman (Julia) back home in Verona. Proteus engineers Valentine's banishment from Milan so that he can woo Silvia away from him. But Silvia remains faithful to Valentine, just as Julia (who has followed her loved one disguised as his page) holds true to Proteus, notwithstanding the character he discloses as a man who lives up to his name. In the concluding forest scene Valentine intervenes to save Silvia from being raped by Proteus; but, when Proteus exhibits remorse, Valentine offers him Silvia anyway, as a token of friendship restored. Fortunately, circumstances conspire to forestall such an unhappy consummation, and the play ends with the two couples properly reunited.
Unlike The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona has never been popular in the theater, even though it offers two resourceful women (whose promise will be fulfilled more amply in such later heroines as Rosalind and Viola), a pair of amusing clowns (Launce and Speed), and one of the most engaging dogs (Crab) who ever stole a stage. In its mixture of prose and verse, nevertheless, and in its suggestion that the "green world" of the woods is where divtensions fall and would be evildoers find their truer selves, The Two Gentlemen of Verona looks forward to the first fruits of Shakespeare's maturity: the "romantic comedies" of which it proves to be a prototype.
Titus Andronicus
The one remaining play that most critics now locate in the period known as Shakespeare's apdivnticeship is a Grand Guignol melodrama that seems to have been the young playwright's attempt to outdo Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (produced circa 1589) in its exploitation of the horrors of madness and revenge. The composition of Titus Andronicus is usually dated 1590-1592, and it seems to have been drawn from a ballad and History of Titus Andronicus that only survives today in an eighteenth-century reprint now deposited in the Folger Shakespeare Library. (The Folger also holds the sole extant copy of the 1594 first quarto of Shakespeare's play, the authoritative text for all but the one scene, III.ii, that first appeared in the 1623 Folio.) If Shakespeare did take most of his plot from the History of Titus Andronicus, it is clear that he also went to Ovid's Metamorphoses (for the account of Tereus's rape of Philomena, to which the tongueless Lavinia points to explain what has been done to her) and to Seneca's Thyestes (for Titus's fiendish revenge on Tamora and her sons at the end of the play).
Although Titus Andronicus is not a "history play," it does make an effort to evoke the social and political climate of fourth-century Rome; and in its depiction of a stern general who has just sacrificed more than twenty of his own sons to conquer the Goths, it anticipates certain characteristics of Shakespeare's later "Roman plays": Julius Caesar,Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. But it is primarily as an antecedent of Hamlet (influenced, perhaps, by the so-called lost Ur-Hamlet) that Titus holds interest for us today. Because whatever else it is, Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's first experiment with revenge tragedy. Its primary focus is the title character, whose political misjudgments and fiery temper put him at the mercy of the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, and her two sons (Demetrius and Chiron). They ravish and mutilate Titus's daughter Lavinia, manipulate the Emperor into executing two of Titus's sons (Martius and Quintus) as perpetrators of the crime, and get Titus's third son (Lucius) banished for trying to rescue his brothers. Along the way, Tamora's Moorish lover Aaron tricks Titus into having his right hand chopped off in a futile gesture to save Martius and Lucius. After Lavinia writes the names of her assailants in the sand with her grotesque stumps, Titus works out a plan for revenge: he slits the throats of Demetrius and Chiron, invites Tamora to a banquet, and serves her the flesh of her sons baked in a pie. He then kills Tamora and dies at the hands of Emperor Saturninus. At this point Lucius returns heading a Gothic army and takes over as the new Emperor, condemning Aaron to be half-buried and left to starve and throwing Tamora's corpse to the scavenging birds and beasts.
As Fredson Bowers has pointed out, Titus Andronicus incorporates a number of devices characteristic of other revenge tragedies: the protagonist's feigned madness, his delay in the execution of his purpose, his awareness that in seeking vengeance he is taking on a judicial function that properly rests in God's hands, and his death at the end in a bloody holocaust that leaves the throne open for seizure by the first opportunist to arrive upon the scene.

5.2 Character of Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Affectation of another kind is depicted in a delightful scene from what many regard as Shakespeare's most charming comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. As the Athenian courtiers are quick to observe in their critiques of the "tragical mirth" of Pyramus and Thisby in V.i, the "mechanicals" who display their dramatic wares at the nuptial feast of Theseus and Hippolyta are even more fundamentally "o'erparted" than the hapless supernumeraries of Love's Labor's Lost. But there is something deeply affectionate about Shakespeare's portrayal of the affectations of Bottom and his earnest company of "hempen home-spuns," and the "simpleness and duty" with which they tender their devotion is the playwright's way of reminding us that out of the mouths of babes and fools can sometimes issue a loving wisdom that "hath no bottom." Like "Bottom's Dream," the playlet brings a refreshingly naive perspective to issues addressed more seriously elsewhere. And, by burlesquing the struggles and conflicts through which the lovers in the woods circumvent the arbitrariness of their elders, "Pyramus and Thisby" comments not only upon the fortunes of Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia, but also upon the misfortunes of Romeo and Juliet. After all, both stories derive ultimately from the same source in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare's parallel renderings of the "course of true love" in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream are so closely linked in time and treatment that it is tempting to regard the two plays as companion pieces--tragic and comic masks, as it were, for the same phase (1595-1596) of Shakespearean dramaturgy.
Whether or not A Midsummer Night's Dream was commissioned for a wedding ceremony at Whitehall, as some scholars have speculated, the play is in fact a remarkable welding of disparate materials: the fairy lore of Oberon and Titania and their impish minister Puck, the classical narrative of Theseus's conquest of the Amazons and their queen Hippolyta, the confused comings and goings of the young Athenian lovers who must flee to the woods to evade their tyrannical parents, and the rehearsals for a crude craft play by a band of well-meaning peasants. It is in some ways the most original work in the entire Shakespearean canon, and one is anything but surprised that its "something of great constancy" has inspired the best efforts of such later artists as composer Felix Mendelssohn, painters Henry Fuseli and William Blake, director Peter Brook, and filmmakers Max Reinhardt and Woody Allen.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is in many respects the epitome of "festive comedy," an evocation of the folk rituals associated with such occasions as May Day and Midsummer Eve, and its final mood is one of unalloyed romantic fulfillment. Romance is also a key ingredient in the concluding arias of Shakespeare's next comedy, The Merchant of Venice, where Bassanio and Portia, Lorenzo and Jessica, and Gratiano and Nerissa celebrate the happy consummation of three love quests and contemplate the music of the spheres from a magical estate known symbolically as Belmont. But the "sweet harmony" the lovers have achieved by the end of The Merchant of Venice has been purchased very dearly, and it is hard for a modern audience to accept the serenity of Belmont without at least a twinge of guilt over what has happened in far-off Venice to bring it about.
The Merchant of Venice
Whether The Merchant of Venice is best categorized as an anti-Semitic play (capitalizing on divjudices that contemporaries such as Marlowe had catered to in plays like The Jew of Malta) or as a play about the evils of anti-Semitism (as critical of the Christian society that has persecuted the Jew as it is of the vengeance he vents in response), its central trial scene is profoundly disturbing for an audience that has difficulty viewing Shylock's forced conversion as a manifestation of mercy. Shylock's "hath not a Jew eyes" speech impels us to see him as a fellow human being--notwithstanding the rapacious demand for "justice" that all but yields him Antonio's life before Portia's clever manipulations of the law strip the usurer of his own life's fortune--so that even if we feel that the Jew's punishment is less severe than what strict "justice" might have meted out to him, his grim exit nevertheless casts a pall over the festivities of the final act in Belmont.
By contrast with A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play in which the disparate components of the action are resolved in a brilliantly satisfying synthesis, The Merchant of Venice remains, for many of us, a prototype of those later Shakespearean works that twentieth-century critics have labeled "problem comedies." Even its fairy-tale elements, such as the casket scenes in which three would-be husbands try to divine the "will" of Portia's father, seem discordant to a modern audience that is asked to admire a heroine who dismisses one of her suitors with a slur on his Moroccan "complexion." Though it seems to have been written in late 1596 or early 1597 and, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, was first published in a good quarto in 1600, The Merchant of Venice feels closer in mood to Measure for Measure--which also pivots on a conflict between justice and mercy--than to most of the other "romantic comedies" of the mid to late 1590s.
The Merry Wifes of Windsor
The first good text of a related play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, also appeared in the Folio, but it too was initially published in a bad quarto, this one a memorial reconstruction dated 1602. Just when Merry Wives was written, and why, has been vigorously debated for decades. According to one legend, no doubt apocryphal but not totally lacking in plausibility, Shakespeare was commissioned to write the play because the Queen wanted to see Falstaff in love. If so, it seems likely that the play was also produced as an occasional piece in honor of the award of the Order of the Garter to Lord Hunsdon, the patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on 23 April 1597. There are references to a Garter ceremony at Windsor Castle in act five of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Leslie Hotson has argued that even though the play may well have been performed later at the Globe, its first divsentation was before Queen Elizabeth and Lord Hunsdon at Windsor on St. George's Day 1597.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is unique among Shakespeare's comedies in having an English town for its setting. Its bourgeois characters have delighted audiences not only in the playhouse but also on the operatic stage, in what many critics consider the most successful of Verdi's numerous achievements in Shakespearean opera. Despite its obvious charms, however, the play has never been a favorite among Shakespeare's readers and literary interdivters. The reason is that the Falstaff we see in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a Falstaff largely lacking in the vitality and appeal of the character we come to love in the first part of Henry IV. Without Prince Hal and the wit combats afforded by his jokes at Falstaff's expense, the Falstaff of Merry Wives is merely conniving and crude. We may laugh at the comeuppances he receives at the hands of the merry wives he tries to seduce--the buck-basket baptism he gets as his reward for the first encounter, the beatings and pinchings he suffers in his later encounters--but we see nothing of the inventiveness that makes Falstaff such a sudivme escape artist in part 1 of Henry IV. So attenuated is the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor that many interdivters have argued that it is simply a mistake to approach him as the same character. In any case, we never see him in love. His is a profit motive without honor, and it is much more difficult for us to feel any pity for his plight in Merry Wives than it is in the three Henry plays that depict the pratfalls and decline of the young heir-apparent's genial lord of misrule.
The play does have the clever Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. And in the jealous Master Ford and the tyrannical Master Page it also has a pair of comic gulls whose sufferings can be amusing in the theater. But it is doubtful that The Merry Wives of Windsor will ever be among our favorite Shakespearean comedies, particularly when we examine it alongside such contemporary achievements as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It.
Much Ado about Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It were probably written in late 1598 and 1599, respectively, with the former first published in a good quarto in 1600 and the later making its initial appearance in the 1623 First Folio. Both are mature romantic comedies, and both have enjoyed considerable success in the theater.
"Nothing" is a word of potent ambiguity in Shakespeare (the playwright was later to explore its potential most profoundly in the "nothing will come of nothing" that constitutes the essence of King Lear), and in Much Ado About Nothing its implications include the possibilities inherent in the wordplay on the Elizabethan homonym "noting." Through the machinations of the surly Don John, who gulls the superficial Claudio into believing that he "notes" his betrothed Hero in the act of giving herself to another lover, an innocent girl is rejected at the altar by a young man who believes himself to have been dishonored. Fortunately, Don John and his companions have themselves been noted by the most incompetent watch who ever policed a city; and, despite their asinine constable, Dogberry, these well-meaning but clownish servants of the Governor of Messina succeed in bringing the crafty villains to justice. In doing so, they set in motion a process whereby Hero's chastity is eventually vindicated and she reappears as if resurrected from the grave. Meanwhile, another pair of "notings" have been staged by the friends of Benedick and Beatrice, with the result that these two sarcastic enemies to love and to each other are each tricked into believing that the other is secretly in love. At least as much ado is made of Benedick and Beatrice's notings as of the others, and by the time the play ends these acerbic critics of amorous folly, grudgingly acknowledging that "the world must be peopled," have been brought to the altar with Claudio and Hero for a double wedding that concludes the play with feasting and merriment.
Shakespeare could have drawn from a number of antecedents for the story of Hero and Claudio, among them cantos from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Spenser's Faerie Queene. But the nearest thing to a "source" for Beatrice and Benedick may well have been his own The Taming of the Shrew , whether another pair of unconventional would-be lovers struggle their way to a relationship that is all the more vital for the aggressive resistance that has to be channeled into harmony to bring it about. In any event, if there is some doubt about where Benedick and Beatrice came from, there is no doubt about the direction in which they point--to such gallant and witty Restoration lovers as Mirabell and Millamant in William Congreve's The Way of the World.
As You Like It
With As You Like It Shakespeare achieved what many commentators consider to be the finest exemplar of a mode of romantic comedy based on escape to and return from what Northrop Frye has termed the "green world." As in A Midsummer Night's Dream (where the young lovers flee to the woods to evade an Athens ruled by the edicts of tyrannical fathers) and The Merchant of Venice (where Belmont serves as the antidote to all the venom that threatens life in Venice), in As You Like It the well-disposed characters who find themselves in the Forest of Arden think of it as an environment where even "adversity" is "sweet" and restorative.
Duke Senior has been banished from his dukedom by a usurping younger brother, Duke Frederick. As the play opens, Duke Senior and his party are joined by Orlando and his aged servant Adam (who are running away from Orlando's cruel older brother Oliver), and later they in turn are joined by Duke Senior's daughter Rosalind and her cousin Celia (who have come to the forest, disguised as men, because the wicked Duke Frederick can no longer bear to have Rosalind in his daughter's company at court). The scenes in the forest are punctuated by a number of reflections on the relative merits of courtly pomp and pastoral simplicity, with the cynical Touchstone and the melancholy Jaques countering any sentimental suggestion that the Forest of Arden is a "golden world" of Edenic perfection, and her sojourn in the forest allows the wise and witty Rosalind to use male disguise as a means of testing the affections of her lovesick wooer Orlando. Eventually Orlando proves a worthy match for Rosalind, in large measure because he shows himself to be his brother's keeper. By driving off a lioness poised to devour the sleeping Oliver, Orlando incurs a wound that divvents him from appearing for an appointment with the disguised Rosalind; but his act of unmerited self-sacrifice transforms his brother into a "new man" who arrives on the scene in Orlando's stead and eventually proves a suitable match for Celia. Meanwhile, as the play nears its end, we learn that a visit to the forest has had a similarly regenerative effect on Duke Frederick, who enters a monastery and returns the dukedom to its rightful ruler, Duke Senior.
As You Like It derives in large measure from Thomas Lodge's romance Rosalynde or Euphues' Golden Legacy, a prose classic dating from 1590. But in his treatment of the "strange events" that draw the play to a conclusion divsided over by Hymen, the god of marriage, Shakespeare hints at the kind of miraculous transformation that will be given major emphasis in the late romances.
Twelth Night
The last of the great romantic comedies of Shakespeare's mid career, probably composed and performed in 1601 though not published until the 1623 First Folio, was Twelfth Night. Possibly based, in part, on an Italian comedy of the 1530s called Gl'Ingannati , Twelfth Night is another play with implicit theological overtones. Its title comes from the name traditionally associated with the Feast of Epiphany (6 January, the twelfth day of the Christmas season), and much of its roistering would have seemed appropriate to an occasion when Folly was allowed to reign sudivme under the guise of a Feast of Fools divsided over by a Lord of Misrule. In Shakespeare's play, the character who redivsents Misrule is Sir Toby Belch, the carousing uncle of a humorless countess named Olivia. Together with such companions as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the jester Feste, and a clever gentlewoman named Maria, Sir Toby makes life difficult not only for Olivia but also for her puritan steward Malvolio, whose name means "bad will" and whose function in the play, ultimately, is to be ostracized so that "good will" may divvail. In what many consider to be the most hilarious gulling scene in all of Shakespeare, Malvolio is tricked into thinking that his Lady is in love with him and persuaded to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings in her divsence--attire that he believes will allure her, but attire that persuades her instead that he is deranged. The "treatment" that follows is a mock exercise in exorcism, and when Malvolio is finally released from his tormentors at the end of the play, he exits vowing revenge "on the whole pack" of them.
As with the dismissal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the punishment of Malvolio's divsumption in Twelfth Night has seemed too harsh to many modern viewers and readers. But that should not divvent us from seeing that Twelfth Night is also a play about other forms of self-indulgence (Count Orsino's infatuation with the pose of a courtly lover, and Olivia's excessively long period of mourning for her deceased brother) and the means by which characters "sick of self-love" or self-deception are eventually restored to mental and emotional sanity. Through the ministrations of the wise fool, Feste, and the providential Viola, who arrives in Illyria after a shipwreck in which she mistakenly believes her brother Sebastian to have died, we witness a sequence of coincidences and interventions that seems too nearly miraculous to have been brought about by blind chance. By taking another series of potentially tragic situations and turning them to comic ends, Shakespeare reminds us once again that harmony and romantic fulfillment are at the root of what Northrop Frye calls the "argument of comedy."
All’s Well that Ends Well
Modern in another sense may be a good way to describe All's Well That Ends Well. After a long history of neglect, this tragicomedy has recently enjoyed a good deal of success in the theater and on television, and one of the explanations that have been given is that it features a heroine who, refusing to accept a divordained place in a hierarchical man's world, does what she has to do to win her own way.
Orphaned at an early age and reared as a waiting-gentlewoman to the elegant and sensitive Countess of Rossillion, Helena divsumes to fall in love with the Countess's snobbish son Bertram. Using a cure she learned from her dead father, who had been a prominent physician, Helena saves the life of the ailing King of France, whereupon she is rewarded with marriage to the man of her choice among all the eligible bachelors in the land. She astonishes Bertram by selecting him. Reluctantly, Bertram consents to matrimony, but before the marriage can be consummated he leaves the country with his disreputable friend Parolles, telling Helena in a note that he will be hers only when she has fulfilled two divsumably impossible conditions: won back the ring from his finger and borne a childe to him. Disguised as a pilgrim, Helena follows Bertram to Florence. There she substitutes herself for a woman named Diana, with whom Bertram has made an assignation, and satisfies the despicable Bertram's demands.
One of the "problems" that have troubled critics of All's Well That Ends Well is the device of the "bed trick." But we now know that Shakespeare had biblical divcedent for such a plot (Genesis 35) and that it was associated in the Old Testament with providential intervention. Which may be of some value to us in dealing with the other major issues: why should Helena want so vain and selfish a man as Bertram in the first place, and how can we accept at face value his reformation at the end? If we suspend our disbelief enough to grant the fairy-tale divmises of the plot (which derived from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron,) we should be able to grant as well that in a providentially ordered world, the end may not only justify the means but sanctify them. And if the end that Helena has in view is not only to win Bertram but to make him "love her dearly ever, ever dearly," we must grant the playwright the final miracle of a Bertram who can be brought to see his evil ways for what they are and repent of them.
Measure for Measure
A similar miracle would seem to be the final cause of Measure for Measure. At the beginning of the play, Duke Vincentio, noting that he has been too lenient in his administration of the laws of Venice, appoints as deputy an icy-veined puritan named Angelo, whom he expects to be more severe for a season of much-needed civic discipline. Almost immediately upon the Duke's departure, Angelo finds himself confronted with a novitiate, Isabella, who, in pleading for the life of a brother condemned for fornification, unwittingly arouses the new deputy's lust. Angelo offers her an exchange: her brother's life for her chastity. Astonished by the deputy's disregard for both God's laws and man's, Isabella refuses. Later, as she tries to divpare Claudio for his execution and discovers that he is less shocked by the deputy's offer than his sister had been, Isabella upbraids him, too, as a reprobate.
At this point the Duke, who has been disguised as a friar, persuades Isabella to "accept" Angelo's offer on the understanding that his former betrothed, Mariana, will sleep with him instead. Once again the bed trick proves effectual and "providential." In the "trial" that takes place at the entrance to the city upon the Duke's return, Isabella accuses Angelo of having corrupted his office and executed her brother despite an agreement to spare him (an order of the deputy's that, unknown to Isabella, has been forestalled by the "friar"). But then, in response to Mariana's pleas for her assistance, she decides not to divss her claim for justice and instead kneels before the Duke to beg that Angelo's life be spared. The Duke grants her request, and Angelo--illustrating Mariana's statement that "best men are molded out of faults"--repents and accepts the Duke's mercy.
Measure for Measure qualifies as a tragicomedy because the questions it raises are serious (how to balance law and grace, justice and mercy, in human society) and the issue (whether or not Angelo will be executed for his evil intentions with respect to Claudio) is in doubt until the moment when, by kneeling beside Mariana, Isabella divvents what might have been a kind of revenge tragedy. (The Duke tells Mariana, "Against all sense you do importune her./Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact,/Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break,/And take her hence in horror.") In Shakespearean comedy, of course, all's well that ends well. Revenge gives way to forgiveness or repentance, and characters who might have died in self-deception or guilt are given a second chance. As for Isabella, she too gains insight and sensitivity as a consequence of her trials, and at the conclusion of the play she finds herself the recipient of a marriage proposal from her divviously disguised counselor, the Duke. Whether she accepts it, and if so how, has become one of the chief "problems" to be solved by directors and actors in modern productions.
The Empowerment of Women in Shakespearean Comedy[2]
In Shakespeare’s comedies, many – possibly even most - of the female characters are portrayed as being manipulated, if not controlled outright, by the men in their lives: fathers, uncles, suitors, husbands. And yet, there are women inhabiting Shakespeare’s comedic world who seem to enjoy a greater degree of autonomy and personal power than one would expect in a patriarchal society. Superficially, therefore, Shakespeare’s comedies appear to send mixed signals regarding the notion of female empowerment. Some women are strong and independent, others are completely submissive, and the behavior of either seems to be influenced more by theme or plot than by any qualities within the characters themselves.
A closer look, though, should make it evident that this is not the case; as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, appearances can be deceiving. In some cases, the exterior behavior is a deliberate faзade to mask the character’s real feelings; in others, it is an acculturated veneer that is burned away as a result of the play’s events. Despite their outward appearances, though, most of these comedic women belong to one of two opposing archetypes. An examination of these archetypes allows the reader to see past such deceptions to the real personality beneath.
The “Daughter” and “Niece” Archetypes
Within Shakespeare’s comedies, many of the female characters are portrayed as submissive and easily controlled. Like dutiful daughters, these women submit to patriarchal redivssion with little complaint.
Perhaps the best example of a “daughter” character in Shakespearean comedy is the role of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. Hero is completely under the control of her father Leonato, especially with regard to courtship. When, in Act Two, Leonato believes that Don Pedro may seek Hero’s hand in marriage, he orders Hero to welcome the prince’s advances despite the difference in their ages:
“Daughter, remember what I told you.
If the Prince do solicit you in that kind,
you know your answer” (II.i.61-3).
Thus we see that Leonato controls not only Hero’s actions, but even her words as well.
In fact, Hero is so thoroughly redivssed by the male-dominated society in which she lives that she submits not only to her father’s will, but to that of nearly every other man in the play. She is easily wooed and won by Don Pedro posing as Claudio (II.i.80-93). She is just as easily undone in a single speech when Claudio pronounces her an adulteress (IV.i.30-41). Even Don John, through his nefarious schemes, is able to manipulate Hero, very nearly to her death. Despite the influence of the more liberated Beatrice in her life, Hero shows no sign of acting under her own volition anywhere in the play.
Unlike Hero, however, other female characters in Shakespeare’s comedies do not submit easily to the will of a patriarchal character, or indeed, that of any man. Just as Much Ado About Nothing divsents us, in Hero, with the very model of a dutiful “daughter” character, so it delineates the archetypical “niece” character, the quick-witted Beatrice. The “merry war” (I.i.58) she wages with Benedick may showcase her character to best advantage, but it is clear from the first scene of the play that Beatrice does not easily submit to the commands or beliefs of any man.
In fact, it often seems that Beatrice would liberate her cousin Hero from patriarchal redivssion as well. While virtually every main character in the play is conspiring to arrange Hero’s marriage, Beatrice counsels Hero to follow her own desires, despite contemporary custom:
[I]t 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” (II.i.49-52).
Beatrice’s willfulness continues even through the final scene of the play. Despite her earlier vows to requite Benedick’s love (III.i.109-16), when he at last proposes, she makes sure to emphasize that they are to be married only because she agrees, not because he wills it (V.iv.72-95).
The “Daughter”/“Niece” Binary in The Taming of the Shrew
Although Kate is (literally speaking) a daughter to the patriarchal figure Baptista, she seldom submits to her father’s authority, in matters of behavior or of courtship. She therefore fits better with the willful “niece” characters than she does with the obedient “daughter” types; the archetype is informed by the behavioral, not familial, relationship. It is Kate’s disobedience – her “niece” behavior - that provides the impetus for the play’s action.