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3 Notes on Shakespearean Equality Equality in Shakespeare generally takes the form of qualities shared by occupants of different social worlds. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, puts friend, foe, and even his own father through a series of tests before revealing himself, he does this not to increase suspense or because of any practical necessity, but simply, it seems to me, to dramatize his own godlike power to conceal and reveal his identity. The gods are essentially above necessity, and Athena, his own protector and a kindred spirit, excels in the use of disguise. But by thus imitating the behavior of an immortal, Odysseus neither makes himself ridiculous nor parodies the gods (making them ridiculous), nor somehow exalts himself at their expense. He simply confirms his own epithet, “godlike.” As a godlike man, Odysseus resembles the gods without being one of them and stands distinctly above the common run of mortals and the other members of his household while still subject to pain, loss, and death. And so when, with Athena’s help, he exercises the godlike privilege of concealment, in no way does he call into question or disturb the hierarchy of power in his world. If Homer had been Shakespeare it might have been otherwise, for in Shakespeare if an inferior should mirror a superior, or indeed if gods should conduct themselves like mortals as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, such duplications can throw an ironic light on the very ordering of power. Shakespeare makes abundant use of dramatic irony, putting us in the position of knowing what one on stage does not, his practice in this respect closer to Homer than to a novelist who makes the reader a character’s equal in knowledge. In the Odyssey Calypso does not know the reason for Hermes’ visit, Odysseus does not know what Calypso was told, and, later, others do not know that he is in fact Odysseus . In A Midsummer Night’s Dream knowledge at times seems distributed like privilege , so that for one to have it another must not. Oberon and Puck know what has come over the lovers, but the lovers themselves have no idea. The mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream seem completely unaware of their crimes against language 37 and their folly in general. Theseus does not know of the fairies afoot in the woods and in his very palace. Puck looks down on mortals as one who knows what they do not—“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (3.2.115)—and Oberon can see what Puck cannot: “That very time I saw (but thou couldst not), / Flying between the cold moon and the earth, / Cupid all arm’d” (2.1.155–57). But through all of this stratification runs a common strain of folly. Oberon himself not only gives Puck a description of Demetrius that, like Cupid’s arrow, misses the mark, but is impelled by jealousy—a force that proverbially makes a fool of its own possessor—into humiliating his own beloved. Perhaps his description is sloppy because his mind is elsewhere. (If so, then he like Theseus is “over-full of self-affairs” [1.1.112]—one of many doublings in the play.) As I will suggest later, folly extends even to the voice of rationality, Theseus. As with the community of folly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, equality in Shakespeare generally takes the form of common qualities shown, or patterns enacted, by different persons in spite of their differences. After Oberon intervenes in Helena’s behalf, but before Theseus overrules the absurd Egeus (thus doing away with the only remaining obstacle to a perfect resolution), Bottom the weaver announces that he has “a device to make all well” (3.1.16). When Dostoevsky makes both the haughty Katerina Ivanovna and the lowly Captain Snegiryov in The Brothers Karamazov come close to selling their honor, he writes in the tradition of Shakespeare. Levin in Anna Karenina arrives at the realization that king and beggar are bound by the same one truth. Shakespeare in King Lear reduces a king to the condition of a beggar and makes him a beggar’s fellow. As an example of ironic mirroring in Shakespeare, consider Falstaff’s talk, as well as practice, of thievery in 1 Henry IV. “We that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars and not by Phoebus, he, ‘that wand’ring knight so fair’” (1.2.13–16). “Do not thou, when thou art...

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