Anne Barton

Twenty years ago, Bertrand Evans published Shakespeare’s Comedies, a book with one idea. Shakespeare, he argued, habitually gives his audience an awareness of the true nature of any dramatic situation greater than that of the characters on the stage. Evans analysed the 13 comedies and the four last plays scene by scene, and concluded that a technique of ‘discrepant awareness’ or ‘exploitable gaps’ between characters and theatre audience lay at the heart of Shakespeare’s dramatic method. ‘It is a fact,’ he announced, ‘that the comedies which approach perfection in their dramatic construction regularly exhibit a high proportion of scenes in which we hold advantage, and that those which are most deficient exhibit a low proportion of such scenes – thus, at the one extreme, Twelfth Night, and, at the other, Troilus and Cressida.’

In Act II of Twelfth Night, Maria says of Malvolio – that poker-faced enemy of cakes and ale, bear-baitings, and all ‘uncivil rule’ – that ‘sometimes he is a kind of Puritan.’ Cautious and qualified though this statement is, Maria retracts it almost at once: ‘the devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass.’ She insists that Malvolio’s defects spring from his own hypocrisy and self-love. They are not, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek wants to believe, associated with a particular religious and political alignment in Elizabethan England. Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s own. Although critics often permit themselves to describe the repressive Angelo in Measure for Measure as ‘puritanical’, no one in the comedy ever does so, nor is any connection implied between the ‘outward-sainted’ deputy and the party which, by 1604, had already begun to indicate its opposition to royal absolutism as well as to Popery in all its forms. As Shakespeare uses it (twice) in All’s well that ends well, the word ‘Puritan’ signifies nothing more than ‘anti-Papist’. In Pericles, it occurs as a straightforward synonym for ‘virtuous’ and even as late as The Winter’s Tale the single ‘puritan’ among the sheep-shearers in Bohemia is no refuser of festivity. He contents himself with fitting psalms to the hornpipes he relishes as much as anyone else.

Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment. Here, Shakespeare was writing about ‘the private life – personal relations and problems of domesticity and daily living – in a way he does nowhere else’. This early essay on Othello, conceived in large part as a rejoinder to Leavis, has been widely and justly influential. Jane Adamson’s meticulous and sensitive reading of the play in Othello as Tragedy can be seen as an extension and development of Bayley’s 1960 approach. Her book catches up Bayley’s resistance, in The Characters of Love, to Leavis’s condescending detachment, his neat placing and dismissal of the hero. Uneasy, like Bayley, both with Bradley’s noble Moor, and Leavis’s criminal egotist, she seeks to understand love’s failure in terms of naturalistically-conceived characters placed in a detailed and convincing social milieu: people who are flawed and psychologically vulnerable in ways we all share.

In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and