Shakespeare’s Comic Rites by Edward Berry

Abstract

Edward Berry, Shakespeare’s Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1984). x, 221. $34.50 (u.s.) The elusive connections between literature and life, art and history, and drama and ritual are the subject of this book. In examining the eight romantic comedies Edward Berry charts the course of lovers from courtship to marriage in light of the major rites of separation, transition, and incor­ poration, and combines, in most cases successfully, the different fields of anthropology, social history, and literary criticism. His indebtedness to Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage, Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process, Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, and Leo Salinger’s Shake­ speare and the Traditions of Comedy is always made clear. So too is his preference of C. L. Barber’s treatment of holiday “seasonal rites” in the comedies over Northrop Frye’s archetypal patterning of the green world in phases of preparation, license, and festivity. Just as he finds suggestive motivation in Salinger’s description of Shakespeare’s comedies as a lyrical, “ ‘emotional and imaginative experience, an inward metamorphosis’ ” (9), he favours Barber’s study of the “festive” movement through “release” to “clarification” leading to “ ‘a heightened awareness of the relation between man and nature’ ” (14), because both lend support to his thesis about Shakespeare’s comic rites of passage affecting the community as well as the individual lovers: Rites of passage . . . are both communal and personal; they mark a crisis in the. life of an individual and redefine his role in society. . .. The comedies work obliquely, suggesting psychological conflict and development through symbols, such as masks, magic, and dreams. And this is precisely the method of rites of passage. (15, 17) Although the cited instances of tribal customs, among the Cuna Indians and the Zulus, for example, are rarely as elucidating of the plays as the tantalizing snippets of Renaissance social history gleaned from Elizabethan and Jacobean account books, travel essays, autobiographies, marriage hand­ books, and apprentices’ journals, Berry does succeed in showing how Shake­ speare’s focus on the comedy of courtship and marriage not only recreates the social patterns of his age but participates in “one of the most ancient and universal patterns of human experience — that of rites of passage” (220). There are times, however, when Berry either overstates or simplifies issues. One is his attempt to locate the centres of ritual in Elizabethan society as residing in the court and church, by distinguishing between Elizabeth’s strategic use of the emotional power of ritual and the “more problematic” (22) rituals of religion. He proposes a very tendentious spec­ trum, situating Catholics and Puritans at either “ extreme” and Anglicans 211 struggling “to define a middle ground” (23). The Catholic position quali­ fies for the label, according to Berry, because it “stressed the efficacy of the sacraments and the value of ritual in drawing people together.” His proof of this “typical” position is an excerpt from an introduction to The Holie Ceremonies of Gods Church, which was an appendix to Laurence Vaux’s A Catechisme or Christian Doctrine. Mistakenly dated by Berry in 1599, this Recusant catechism, the work of a Manchester priest who later became an Augustinian monk, was first published in Louvain in 1567. Influenced greatly by Tridentine manuals, especially the work of Peter Canisius, Vaux’s catechism occupies a unique (not merely typical) place in catechetics as one of the first Catholic formularies in English. What is most sur­ prising is Berry’s neglect of Vaux’s clear, standard, though non-extreme definition of a sacrament itself as “a visible forme of an invisible grace, which is instituted of God for our Sanctification. In every Sacrament is an outward forme or maner, that wee may see with our corporall eyes: under the which lieth hidden an invisible grace that wee cannot see with our cor­ porall eies: which we must firmely beleeve.” 1 Surely such a definition relates to rather than opposes notions of sign and symbols, inward metamorphosis and psychological development. This instance of oversimplification is not as abstruse or tangential as it may appear. Not only has Berry moved too hurriedly over the whole issue of “ the history of ritual in...