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COPYRIGHT 2004 Rice University
BENEDICK. By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me.
BEATRICE. Do not swear and eat it. BENEDICK. I will swear by it that you love me, and I will make him eat it that says I love not you. Much Ado about Nothing, IV.i.272-5 BEATRICE. O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place! Much Ado about Nothing, IV.i.303-4 (1)
I. SHAKESPEARE AND CANNIBALISTIC CONCEITS
In Shakespeare's works, as in those of his contemporaries, people often talk of eating one another. Hamlet complains of "monster custom, who all sense doth eat" (III.iv. 151.1); in Twelfth Night, Duke Orsino condemns the inconstant nature of woman's "appetite" (II.iv. 95); Othello "bewitches" Desdemona with tales of cannibals and "Anthropophagi" (I.iii.142-3); a friend warns Timon that "a number of men eats [him]" and that "[ladies] eat lords" (I.ii.38 and I.i.208); Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida observes that "one man eats into another's pride" (III.iii.131); Coriolanus worries that the masses wish to eat him (III.i); and although Shylock never actually promises to eat Antonio's pound of flesh, the play's "good" Christians ridicule his demanded "interest" as an unholy, egregiously consumptive act, quite opposed to their own "pious" speculations and appetites.
Of course, in Shakespeare's works no one ever literally eats anyone else. (2) The consumption of human flesh represents the symbolic order's limit point, a threshold that must not be crossed. "Abjection this way lies" might be an appropriate subtext for these speech acts and their service as metaphors for the tainting of the sacred--or at least the licit and sanctioned--by the profane, sullied, and illicit. In almost every invocation of the eating of human flesh (metaphoric, to be sure), Shakespeare invokes a circumscription of the (fallen) body from the utopian ideal of a pure, symbolic, and transcendent order; put otherwise, he documents the loss of such a distinction, both potential and actual. Yet, these speech acts serve simultaneously as the constitutive ground of that symbolic order, for the repeated exorcising of the actual consumption of human flesh (replaced with a fetishistic discursive re-enactment of this consumption) engenders the space for community, the necessary basis of the social order itself. One of the more complex invocations of community and cannibalism ("cannibal" itself a recently coined term in Shakespeare's lexicon) occurs in Much Ado about Nothing, often celebrated as one of the "sunniest" of Shakespeare's comedies. The first scene of act IV concludes with Beatrice and Benedick alone, hesitantly swearing their love for one another. Beatrice has just witnessed the humiliation of her cousin Hero at the hands of Benedick's companions; Shakespeare has, in fact, loosed the full complement of patriarchal authority against Beatrice and Hero, threatening both with the indelible "stain" of unchaste behavior. Beatrice's initial reaction to Benedick's avowal of love is that he must "not swear and eat it"--that he not subsequently recant his pledge (IV.i.273). This leads to an exchange of puns, in which Benedick swears he will "make him eat it that says I love not you" (IV.i.274-5). The invocation of this traditional conceit of love as a consumable part of the self, a transcendent synecdoche of the material body, signifies the pair's self-positioning as legitimate lovers within the symbolic order. But Beatrice puts Benedick's "word" immediately to the test with her demand that he "kill Claudio" (IV.i.287). Benedick's denial--"Not for the wide world" (IV.i.288)--elicits her anger at and sense of helplessness within the play's gender hierarchy, for would that she "were a man" she could then "eat his [Claudio's] heart in the market place" (IV.i.303-4). A potentially transgressive moment, this exchange both encapsulates the symbolic role of cannibalism within the play's theatrical/ideological economy and simultaneously hints at the excessive presence of the Lacanian "Real," which the remainder of the play and so many of its authority figures labor mightily to repress. (3)
The complexity of what might best be termed the scene's cannibalistic "conceit" depends upon several interlocking cultural-discursive traditions. First and foremost, Beatrice invokes the rhetoric of vengeance by employing language of the "typical" tragic revenger whose actions, motivated by a growing recognition of the lack of innate social justice, traditionally move the revenger away from the culturally sanctioned. This process of alienation has long been recognized as integral to the revenge process. As Robert Ornstein explains in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy: "the revenging hero almost invariably has no way of bringing his criminal opponent to justice, either because no proof of the crime exists, or because the criminal is placed beyond the reach of justice, or because justice itself is a mockery in the hero's society." (4) Thus, the basic question faced by the revenger is not what form retribution should take, but whether one is indeed capable of taking action in the first place. As Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallett have more recently noted, the resultant alienation from this dilemma pushes the revenger to the limits of social rationality: "the revenge tragedy form, with its obligatory madness of the revenger, presupposes that a commitment to the irrational limits the amount of truth which the psyche can attain to through the descent into the self, for the very reason that the irrational keeps one preoccupied with the self." (5)
Beatrice's frustration with her inability to act, however, is not merely a byproduct of a generalized "descent into the self," but rather her recognition of the limit of her subjectivity as a woman constituted as such by her culture. This is the second cultural-discursive tradition engaged by Beatrice in the scene. For Beatrice realizes that she cannot enact revenge for the very reason that she is a woman and consequently locked into specific gender roles: "I cannot be a man with wishing, / therefore I will die a woman with grieving" (IV.i.317-8). The authority of multiple discourses forbids Beatrice to assume the role of revenger, constructing for her a "natural" feminine position of passive objectification and acceptance of the Law, rather than its questioning. Simply to invoke such active, violent, and transgressive language destabilizes Beatrice's gender position--hence her frustrated recognition that her action is already circumscribed, limited to grieving over injustices done rather than acting upon that grief.
Beatrice's desire to "eat" Claudio's heart in the "market place" (a decidedly public locus) is thus frustrated not simply because she lacks the "stomach" to become a revenger, but because her gender will not allow for a matter-ization of her desire; she can speak of her desires all she wants--as long as they are directed to the sympathetic ears of Benedick and not, for instance, to the insuperable patriarchal assumptions manifested by the play's authority figures--but she cannot enact them. (6) This is how the third cultural-discursive tradition circumscribes her subjectivity, for the cultural limits that Beatrice has recognized she cannot cross--enacting revenge by acting as a man--are in turn defined by community. The community marks the limits of its constitution by the possibility of cannibalism, by the potential for consuming human flesh, but also by the simultaneous "rational" decision to deny or cross out that possibility, replacing it with the safety of discourse's endlessly deferred satisfaction. If revenge is an inherently masculine activity, the constantly erased "absent presence" of cannibalism marks the ground upon which that activity is rendered possible. Proper speech acts--rational public discourse--is therefore authorized as a production of a specifically male community, a dictate that,...
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