Shakespeare’s Comic Commonwealths by Camille Wells Slights (review)

146 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 gives to both the Olivier film of 1944 and the Branagh film 'of 19891 both of which extensively cut and adapt Shakespeare's text in offering a particular directorial interpretation in keeping with the general mood of the _ times. (ANNE LANCASHIRE) Camille Wells Slights. Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths University of Toronto Press. viii, 290. $45.00 Professor Slights begins her study of Shakespearean comedy by quoting Bottom - 'reason and love keep little company together now-a-days. The more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends' - and declaring that her interest is not in the irrationality of love but in the importance of community implied in Bottom's reference to honest neighbours. In so dOing, she moves away from the older school of criticism that saw Shakespeare's comedies as explorations of the experience of love and places herself in the contemporary school that takes the social dimension of Shakespeare's work as its primary subject. This could have meant exchanging one stultifying orthodoxy for another; but her work is better than that. She reads the plays with tact, sensitivity, and insight; she is alive to the differences between them and to the differences between Shakespeare's society and ours; and her use of the social history in which the plays are embedded is finely judged. The shift from an interest in love to an interest in society appears most clearly in her discussions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's Lost. Instead of seeing the fanner as a study of the pains and follies of immature love, she sees it as 'a comic exploration of the nature and function of a gentleman.' The repartee of Valentine and Proteus is an attempt, frequently strained, to live up to the gentlemanly ideal of witty conversation. But their ambition to behave like gentlemen collapses into competitiveness and deception. In the outlaws of the forest they glimpse an 'older idea of the gentleman .... the aristocratic armed warrior,' loyal only to his imlnediate group. After a glimpse of this uncivil world, they return to the new values of courtesy and are reconciled. Similarly, in Love's Labollr's Lost, Slights concerns herself not with the love relationships as such but with the group dynamics they involve. Even Berowne appears to stand out as an individual only because he 'articulates the inconsistencies and absurdities of group behavior.' At the same time, working against the impression of competitiveness the play usually gives, she reads its wit-combats as sport that brings the participants together in mutual enjoyment of the game, levelling social classes and excluding only those who lack the wit to play. Both readings are illuminating, and the chapter on Love's Labour's Lost is particularly incisive. Her insistence that in As You Like It Rosalind is not trying to create a personal relationship HUMANmES 147 with Orlando so much as to get him to play the social roles of lover and husband may appear more strained, but it is an important part of her argument that in the world these plays show personal and social roles are hard-to disentangle. The Comedy of Errors shows the importance of community in that the characters suffer when their social roles are disrupted, and the solution lies not in isolation (Pinch's treatment for madness) but in convergence, bringing the whole group together. Similarly, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew craves social approval, and achieves happiness by winning that approval through submitting to her husband and becoming a model for other wives. (At the same time, she has educated Petruchio; thinking at first that he will simply marry a dowry, he becomes interested in his wife as a person.) The importance of the community is seen most strongly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The wives need to humiliate Falstaff in public, demonstrating their wit and virtue to the community; Ford needs to prove his suspicions to his neighbours, and to apologize to them when he is proved wrong. By modern standards these communities are hierarchical and potentially or achtally oppressive; Slights takes due account of that. But she also shows...