Shakespeare's Mastiff Comedy

Abstract

CCASIONALLY IN HIS CAREER AS PLAYWRIGHT, William Shakespeare availed himself of the materials of his rivals in the business of public entertainment. Notoriously, Robert Greene's accusation of 1592 that there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers . . . [who] is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey seems to suggest that Shakespeare had helped himself too freely to others' work and, worse still, had thereby flown higher than they.' Shakespeare's indebtedness to predecessors and contemporaries for everything from plots to phrases is by now well attested in a body of criticism that, unlike Greene, celebrates Shakespeare's conceit. In this essay I will explore Shakespeare's appropriation of the materials of a different sort of rival tradition: neither Marlowe's mighty line nor the prose of chronicle history; neither Kyd's revenge-plotting nor ecclesiastical ritual; but rather the symbolic energies of his professional neighbors, the bears and dogs of Bankside. For Shakespeare's contemporaries, bearbaiting and theater were culturally isomorphic events.2 From the architecture that housed them to the ordinances that inhibited them, the spectacles were considered analogous-if not, to their opponents, identical in their depravity. After a brief assessment of bearbaiting and its geographical and cultural position in Shakespeare's London, I will explore, in this reddish light, the play in which I think Shakespeare uses the sport's bloody routines most intricately, both to illuminate the psychology and relationships of his characters and to explore the dramatic medium itself: Twelfth Night, or What You Will.3