The Discourses of Friendship and the Structural Imagination of Shakespeare's Theater: Montaigne, Twelfth Night, De Gournay

Laurie Shannon begins her fine study, subtitled Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, with the statement that "in any history of friendship, the early modern period commands particular attention."¹ Such attention is especially marked because on the subject of the friend, the period recovers and invigorates the classical, philosophical discourses on friendship exemplified by Aristotle and Cicero. But it also subjects those discourses to the pressure of the modern—in a series of political and more broadly ideological developments that Jacques Derrida reveals in the word "perhaps."²

In his critique of the masculinist tradition of "fraternity" that lies at the center of traditional friendship discourses, Derrida repeatedly asks why the "sister" is given no place in the exclusive "brotherhood" of friends. In Shannon's view, women were systematically excluded from the very possibility of friendship by a historically specific obsession with "poeticized likeness" in which the "repeated privileging of (erotic and non-erotic) same-sex bonds over (presumptively erotic) heterosexual relations marks a gaping distance between early modern 'homonormative' affects and contemporary heterosexual normativity."³ The gaps between these two kinds of normativity have raised two critical issues, especially as they concern the double, but asymmetrical, disjunction of friendship from erotic desire⁴ and the "scandal" of female friendship, especially in lesbian relationships, in the early modern period.⁵ None of the recent work on these issues pays much detailed historical or philosophical attention to the question of friendship between men and women, however. I am therefore deliberately ignoring friendship between women and same-sex male relationships to focus on the possibilities of friendship between men and women in Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the peculiar literary collaboration that marked Montaigne's relationship with Marie De Gournay. But first, a word on the specificity of theatrical practice and its relation to the representation of concepts and their conjunction with bodies.

Shakespeare's Structural Imagination

Twelfth Night presents a vision of female erotic desire and constant amity through what I call the "structural imagination" of theatrical cross-dressing. This concept encompasses the way in which the historical possibilities of imagining something new may be structural or generic rather than merely personal or psychological. Cross-dressing as an aspect of the structural imagination available to Shakespeare is the product of the theater at a specific moment. Such structural conditions of Shakespeare's stage enable him to imagine—and to invite his audience to imagine—an opening up of philia to eros and gender difference. We shall see that Montaigne's essays contain a different kind of potential for dialogic complication in the form of his friendship with Marie De Gournay and her part in their editing and dissemination.

Valerie Traub notes the theater's deliberate staging of the conflicting representations of gender and sexuality:

Within formal, generic constraints, the work of containing the female gender and of constructing woman-as-representation is staged, enacted both in the text and in the theatre as dramatic conflict—with female characters, and male characters and bodies figured as female, struggling for the power that both inheres in and defies representation.⁶

In Twelfth Night, especially, such staging involves not only the conflict between represented and representing bodies but also the presence of a single body in a double aspect. Since the actor necessitates the physical embodiment of subjectivity not available in the wholly textual medium of the essay, cross-gendered theater makes possible a split subjectivity in the shape of a single body represented and perceived in two aspects at once: both duck and rabbit,⁷ young man and young woman, friend and lover, and philia and eros.⁸ If Montaigne is constrained by a Galenic psychology to imagine men and women as subjectivities trapped by essentially different bodies and psyches, Shakespeare's cross-dressed theater allows him to challenge the inevitability of that division and its attendant ideological strictures. This is not a claim about Shakespeare's personal enlightenment in contrast to his French predecessor—it is an observation about the different possibilities made structurally available by the...