Bed-trick and forced marriages. Shakespeare's distortion of romantic comedy motifs in Measure for Measure
Résumé
The genre of Measure for Measure keeps baffling critics. Although the Folio ranks it among the comedies, it is conventionally defined as a " Problem Play " 1 , a genre exploding the very notion of genre itself. Although Measure for Measure ends with marriages and thus looks like a comedy, it is devoid of celebration and its ending resolves none of the tensions aroused by the action. The Problem Plays in general, and Measure for Measure in particular, especially contrast with Shakespeare " s earlier, " romantic " comedies although one finds in it some of their features and patterns. But these motifs are treated in an ironical way and seen through a distorting mirror. The marriage bed to which couples withdraw at the end of romantic comedies here takes the shape of the morally puzzling bed-trick, and marriage itself, which is conventionally the emblem of fulfilment and embodies a promise of happiness and harmony, is garbed with negative connotations. One of the most blatant consequences of the distortion of romantic comedy motifs in Measure for Measure is the disempowerment of female characters. Indeed, at the end of the play, they are violently levelled out, at the lowest possible level: they all become like the street prostitute Kate Keepdown, that is to say women who are totally dependent on men and who exist above all through their sexual status. This article purposes to demonstrate that Shakespeare uses traditional comic devices such as the bed-trick and the concluding marriages in a very unusual way, which participates in the generic ambiguity of Measure for Measure and in its confusion of female roles. In this perspective, the questions of genre and gender appear as tightly linked: the problematic genre of the play entails a heightened ambiguity of female roles. The borderlines between both generic and gender categories blur, and elements and roles which are traditionally kept apart overlap. After a brief presentation of the problems the genre of Measure for Measure poses, I will dwell on the use Shakespeare makes of the bed-trick and the concluding, supposedly happy marriages, to show that these reworkings lead, among other things, to the blurring of the categories of female characters. Measure for Measure shares attributes with other types of plays such as Shakespeare " s romantic comedies or romances, and even reflects concerns central to tragedies, without quite belonging to any of these genres. It has the apparent conventional ending of a comedy but the rest of the play does not include such prominent features of romantic comedy as the courtship between lovers. There is no sense of harmony and completeness at the end. The comic design of the play thus emerges as highly unsatisfactory. So that, as Jean E. Howard puts it in her article " The Difficulties of Closure " , one may say that there is the presence of conflicting generic codes in Measure for Measure 2. To her, if the play poses a problem to readers and audiences, it is mainly because it repeatedly evokes comic expectations only to make us aware of the gap between those expectations and the features of the play, be it in terms of structure, characterization or style, refusing to fit in with the comic frame 3. In other words, critics and audience are invited to understand the action of Measure for Measure in terms of the dominant generic code, but they are unable to do so without strain 4. One finds in the play a variety of influences of other genres. As Richard Hillman argues in Shakespeare. The Problem Plays, the Problem Plays have been seen in terms of romantic material subjected to fundamentally disjunctive, sometimes jarring, realistic treatment 5. The stories dramatized in these plays have medieval origins and appear to have come to Shakespeare in versions preserving the typical qualities of romance 6. According to Hillman, Shakespeare was making different uses of familiar and old-fashioned fables, rendering them more ambiguous and complex than their original Manichean design 7. In the Problem Plays,
Domaines
Littératures
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)