The Dialectics of Shakespeare's Comedies

ELLIOT KRIEGER THE DIALECTICS OF SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES The second world in Shakespeare's comedies is always more than just a place; it is a style and an attitude, a way of living in the forest, or between wars, or outside of the lines of trade or of the intrigues of court-and as such it is created from within the primary world as a strategic response to apparently insoluble problems ofthat world. The second worlds in Shakespeare's comedies are separate from the primary worlds in only a limited way; in fact, die creation of a second world is a particular strategy for, or a manner of, living within the world that the comedy represents. The second world does not give us a perspective on the primary world, nor does it give us ironic awareness of the primary world, nor is it the complement of the primary world. Its relation to the primary world is not just oppositional and antinomic, but causal and therefore antithetic. The creation of the second world is part of a dialectical process, initiated by die characters represented in the primary world, and as such is a direct response to the repressive, often tyrannical, everyday world (e.g., the freedom of Arden is a direct response to the restrictions of the court, the games and intrigues of Messina directly respond to the blunt honesty of combat and of wars of honor). When we interpret the second world as created from within the primary world, a much greater emphasis is placed on the primary world and consequently on the dramatic naturalism rather than on the conventionalism of Shakespeare's technique. In other words, to see the creation of the second world as part of a dialectical process is to see the second world not as a dramatic (or as an archetypal) convention, but as a typical and logical response to and by means of the social relations that Shakespeare realistically presents in his comedies. Dialectical analysis of the structure of Shakespeare's comedies can be accused of being a way of ignoring dramatic conventions in order to come to certain conclusions about the societies represented in the drama; however , the proper function of the dialectic is to go beyond the dramatic conventions , to accept the conventions but not at their face value. When the creation of the second world is seen as dialectical, the important point about the dramatic conventions becomes not Shakespeare's use of them in representing a dramatic society, but the way in which the characters in Shakespeare 's dramatic societies most efficiently achieve verismUitude through their use or their abuse of dramatic convention. This principle, when applied to the comedies, can mean the difference between explaining and ex- 84 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW plaining away such apparent inconsistencies as Rosalind's failure to speak to her father while she is in disguise, or Claudio's willingness to marry Hero's cousin. Dialectical criticism, as it makes idealization—retreat to a created second world-an aspect of the realistic behavior of the play's characters, makes dramatic convention (which would have explained the idealization) into a version of social convention. The creation of the second world is a response to exigencies of the material world, and it is a response originating in the minds of the protagonists; only as the comedy progresses does the response become objectified into a world. The dialectical creation of the second world, although it represents and translates social conventions, begins as a psychological process, and can be associated with psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, for in the comedies the protagonists narcissistically dissociate themselves from the material world and create a second world centered on themselves and on their desires . If the theory of narcissism is to be useful as anything more than an analogy in discussing the comedies, however, we must be alert to two important qualities of narcissism that were discussed by Freud in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917), (ed. James Strachey, Standard Edition, XVI, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1963). First, narcissism is not the same thing as egoism, but "narcissism. . . is the libidinal complement to egoism"; second, narcissism is both a...