Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (review)

Ira Clark’s study of the Shakespeare problem play aims to refine critical reception of this dramatic mode by departing from recent historical, sociological interpretations of the form, employing a neoformalist approach informed by rhetorical theory. Clark’s focus on suasion and figuration operates thoroughly within the classical humanist tradition of rhetorical analysis, rather than a deconstructive critique of tropes typified by the work of Patricia Parker. While he acknowledges that such a vantage point now functions as something of a novelty, Clark nevertheless argues persuasively that recent approaches to early seventeenth-century comedy have failed to resolve the genre’s inherent formal difficulties. Rather than entailing a departure from history, Clark posits that a rhetorical approach to the Shakespeare problem play can reaffirm its place within the practice of city-oriented, satirically inflected comedy characteristic of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. While Clark lays out promising evidence for viewing Shakespeare’s work in this context, such a premise remains only tentatively sketched out in the book’s opening and closing sections, and not as fully realized as it might have been. The book ultimately stands on its individual close readings of the plays, arguments that at their best advance our understanding of their rhetorical underpinnings. In less successful moments, however, Clark’s arguments lose momentum in abstraction, passages of excessive summary, or conclusions that too readily echo traditional conceptions about the Shakespeare problem play.

Chapters 3 through 5 each focus on a single work, reappraising its “problematic” identity through one type of rhetorical gesture or trope. In his first and most sharply argued chapter, Clark examines the role of justice and mercy in Measure for Measure by reference to chiasmus. In traditional theory, schemes function as figures of “sound” through their rearrangement of word patterns, while tropes operate as figures of “thought” or “sense,” transforming words beyond their ordinary meaning. In an interesting challenge to these dubious categories, Clark offers plentiful evidence of chiasmus as a way to reassess the play’s representations of virtue and vice, as well as the systems of justice which claim to arbitrate the boundaries between them. In dramatic contexts in which characters debate the relative merits of law versus Christian mercy, Measure for Measure offers rich ground for undercutting ethical certitudes, as well as for staging rebuttal, reversal, and suspension on a variety of topics. Clark contrasts this use of chiasmus to forestall closure and certainty against the scheme’s application in 2 Henry IV to dramatize the newly crowned King Henry’s shift in allegiance from Falstaff to the Lord Chief Justice. While the dramatic use of chiasmus in the history play produces closure and symmetry in favor of conventional institutional codes, no such balance can be found in Measure for Measure, where characters and their ethical positions are repeatedly subject to external dispute or internal hypocrisy. While Duke Vincentio attempts to bring closure to the play with a chiasmic marriage proposal (“‘What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine’”), his effort “is controverted by the situation in which it is spoken” (44). For Clark, Vincentio’s evident power over Isabella in this scene vitiates his pretense of reciprocity: “Spoken by a duke to a subject, a man to woman, an elder to a junior, a Machiavel to an innocent, [his chiasmus] sounds . . . like ‘What’s mine is mine, and what is yours is mine’” (44).

The power of chiasmus to present contradiction in elegant, witty contests of public debate or private rumination finds its parallel in the use of the prudential maxim in All’s Well that Ends Well. In chapter 4, Clark analyzes Helen’s progress in terms of aphorism, charting the heroine’s story as a series of contests in which proverbs embody efforts to thwart her aspirations. Humanist tradition in England lauded the aphorism as a repository of received wisdom. Nevertheless, Clark notes that it was precisely in the opening decade...