Calling Fools into a Circle: The Woman’s Prize, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It

Abstract

I suggested in Chapter 4 that Richard III satisfies its spectator’s participation in the performance by converting the ‘term’ of theatrical occupation into a habit of critical spectatorship. A feature of this satisfaction is the fact that, as the play moves towards its conclusion, it offers opportunities to renegotiate terms even more beneficial than those of the bond with Richard sustained across the central part of the play. What results is a shift from a position of reception that could be seen as a kind of coverture (‘man and wife is one flesh’)1 to something more like Elizabeth Woodville, the widow who, in 4.4, emerges from passivity to a powerful position in the negotiation of the Tudor succession. For Richard, his courtship of Elizabeth, both mother and daughter, merely repeats his successful seduction of Anne in 1.2. For the audience, it is the end of one special relationship and the beginning of another. In a superb piece of theatrical timing, in which the crucial information is provided as an afterthought to a greeting sent by the elder Stanley to his son (‘Well, hie thee to thy lord ... Tell him the Queen hath heartily consented He should espouse Elizabeth [4.5.16-18]), the scenes that follow are the first in which the spectator’s grasp of the plot exceeds Richard’s. This shift creates an effect of generic redirection that affiliates the action with the open-ended temporality of the courtship plot of Shakespearean comedy, and with the conception of female agency which would come to be associated with it.KeywordsNameable EntityFictional WorldTheatrical WorldParty PositionMarriage SettlementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.