Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy

Shakespearean Social Comedy -- Saturnalian inversion or soulful exploration of social outsiders?

Barber's book, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy argues for a socially harmonious interpretation of Shakespeare's comedic plays. In contrast, the scholar Richard A. Levine's Love and Society in Shakespeare's Comedy proposes a socially subversive reading of the Shakespearean comedy, as kind of hidden tragedies of 'outsider' figures, rather than Saturnalian revelry. This contrast between the two authors may orginate in the fact that Barber focuses on the major characters of the dramatic texts, while Levine's thesis is detrived from his focus on comedy's outsider figures, such as Shylock and Malvolio. Levine argues that Shakespeare's comedic structure is really one of social critique rather than social affirmation because of the presence of such outsider figures, often excluded from romantic coupling.

Barber begins his book by stating that Shakespeare modeled his early comedies on traditional, pagan holiday entertainments. These were traditional dramatic games of sex and temporary social inversion derived from pagan fertility rituals such as the Saturnalia. What Barber calls "the whole moral superstructure of Elizabethan society," prevented these games from spilling out into the street, however, and caused them to be diverted into the safer space of the theater, where temporary social inversions could be contained through dramatic narrative. (Barber, 17) For instance, before abuse might be hurled at actual individuals, then in the outdoors "Summer Lord Game" a stuffed animal intended to represent a real, local lord might be mocked and abused, and finally in the Elizabethian theater, the social critique could be removed and contained even more, from the will and play of the common people.

Barber also argues these inversions of hierarchy in the holiday festivity were never truly subversive in practice, because their ultimate purpose remained the realization of man's relation to the rhythms of nature. The "saturnalian pattern," "involve[s] inversion, statement and counterstatement, and a basic movement which can be summarized in the formula," of a "release to clarification."(19) Ideologically, this Saturnalian movement is fundamentally conservative. The release it provides is intended in a purely psychological sense, not a social sense as a temporary freedom from cultural inhibitions. It is expressed "in the idyllic comedies ... By making the whole experience of the play like that of a revel."(20) The experience of the revel, although involving potentially dangerous heterodox behavior, ends in a celebration of cultural renewal that returns the society to a recognition of presumably fundamental, eternal values.

The fact that so many of Shakespeare's plays, such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream" involve a descent into chaos and then a return from the woods might make Barber seem persuasive. But Richard A. Levin challenges the Saturnalia reading by focusing on the outsiders of the comedic plays, such as "The Merchant of Venice," where Shylock and Antonio are excluded from money and marriage, respectively. In "Much Ado About Nothing," according to Levin, Beatrice and Don Pedro, stand outside the social order of masculine military validation and marriage. And in "Twelfth Night," the polar opposites of Malvolio and Feste are estranged as well from the final couplings. The movement, Levine argues is not from harmony to chaos to 'better' harmony, but from a false idyll (such as the shipwreck of "Twelfth Night" or the melancholy of Antonio, the "Merchant"), true social dissolution and violence, and a renewed order with many apparent rends in its fabric.