Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery by Robert Ornstein

Abstract

Reviews91 this reason other works than Shakespeare's at the time simply omitted the wife in vignettes of the perfect family. Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis (1627) makes the mother invisible; when her function is alluded to, she is shown as hidden behind a screen while the father and children reign over the state. Thus the father's claim to obedience is emphasized by simply omitting the wife. Thus also birth is absorbed by the male who usurps human fecundity as his. The return of daughters to the kings in the last plays gifts them with the values that females carry, but in a nubile, procreative, yet conciliatory and obliging form, unlike the kinds of forces an adult woman (wife) might introduce. Williamson further shows how Shakespeare reverts to pastoral models with providential natural settings in which to mythologize power structures such as the father in charge of the family. James' emphasis on the king's two bodies underlies this pattern too. The sovereign body is asexual and reproduces asexually like the Phoenix. Thus Pericles first (before the mother) finds Marina on stage as does Leontes his daughter. Williamson explicates many other patterns too; I only touch above on the ones most fascinating to me. This is a critical and academic book that deserves lay reading. Shakespeare is universal to the education of the young in Western culture and is often taught as the ultimate portrayal of the universal human condition. The power of his language and certain tragic/cosmic themes seem to confirm this premise. But Shakespeare was as culture-bound as anyone else, and Williamson's book discloses the often ugly patriarchal substructure to plots and genre choice. Williamson's book is so thoroughly grounded in the history and sociology of Shakespeare 's time and current psychoanalytical theory that her theories are both far-reaching, substantial, and in my opinion almost wholly accurate. I think her book will become definitive, a classic in the criticism on Shakespeare's last plays. The book hurts. It may be ahead of its time. For those of us who have reached middle age with a comfortable view of Shakespeare's last plays as reflecting the aged bard's love of the natural cycles in the cosmos, Williamson's book is jolting but convincing. It renders dark truths. STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS Western Michigan University Robert Ornstein. Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1986. Pp. 265. $34.50. I think this book's virtues are, on the other side, its limitations, though the latter are surely relative to the biases of the beholder. Allow, then, this beholder to put forth his biases: a metadramatic scholar, increasingly given to performance criticism, I also work as a director for the stage. Here, in seventeen chapters, fifteen of them devoted to as many of Shakespeare's comedies (with The Merry Wives of Windsor excluded), Ornstein in a highly rational prose style, always judicious, sometimes elegant, keeps his eye mostly on the texts of the plays. Concerned with the form of the comedies, which he defines as essentially closed and there- 92Comparative Drama by offering the reader an "emotional and aesthetic satisfaction" (p. 248), he talks about the characters and their dramatic worlds in general psychological terms, far short of those more psychoanalytic. There is little room here for what the actor would call the character's "sub-text." There are brief references to actual performances, some thoughts on the characters as they might appear on the stage (usually signaled by phrases such as "flesh and blood"), and illuminating comparisons with Shakespeare 's contemporaries: for example, LyIy would have ended Love's Labor's Lost with a noble denunciation of desire. Yet, for the most part, Ornstein brings his good sense to what he thinks we can say about the play as deduced from its language, and therefore, as he observes in a fine concluding chapter, in a way consistent both with Shakespeare's intentions and, equally, with the "congruity" of Shakespeare criticism over the centuries. The latter, while revealing "often radical . . . disagreements about a handful of characters," also "testifies to the essential clarity and wholeness of Shakespeare's...