|
COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
I
I take the title of this essay from Francis Ford's first soliloquy in The Merry Wives of Windsor.(1) Misconstruing his wife's merriment as unfaithfulness, the distracted Ford laments:
See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abus'd, my coffers ransack'd, my reputation gnawn at, and I shall not only receive this villainous wrong, but stand under the adoption of abominable terms, and by him that does me this wrong. Terms! names! Amaimon sounds well; Lucifer, well; Barbason, well; yet they are devils' additions, the names of fiends; but Cuckold! Wittol!--Cuckold! the devil himself hath not such a name.
I will prevent this, detect my wife, be reveng'd on Falstaff, and laugh at Page. I will about it; better three hours too soon than a minute too late. Fie, fie, fie! cuckold, cuckold, Cuckold! (2.2.291-300, 310-14)
In this passage, Ford tests a series of interchangeable self-designations--Amaimon, Lucifer, Barbason--before settling upon the term to which his own particular hell entitles him: cuckold. It is a term that he prematurely adopts in order to distinguish himself from the "wittol," from the foolish husband who would knowingly endure his wife's infidelity. Ford announces that Alice Ford's adultery would threaten his control over her sexuality, over his wealth, and, most unendurably, over his good name. He emphasizes that she is his property and, more specifically, that she is property with which she cannot be entrusted. He does so by marshalling a string of proverbial insults about those who make "fritters of English" (5.5.143). "I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter," he says, "Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself" (2.2.302-5). Ford pledges to diminish the threat of an "abus'd" bed by publicizing his wife's plans. He seals that pledge by reiterating the single, abominable term to which his identity has been reduced: "Cuckold, cuckold, cuckold!"
Although Ford's fellow inhabitants of Windsor do not share his disruptive jealousy, they do share his preoccupation with the terms that designate their shifting and uneven relationships to one another. As the play's opening lines indicate, that preoccupation frequently takes the form of a perpetual naming and self-naming:
Shallow: Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star Chamber matter of it. If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.
Slender: In the county of Gloucester, justice of Peace and Coram.
Shallow: Ay, cousin Slender, and Custa-lorum.
Slender: Ay, and Rato-lorum too; and a gentleman born, Master Parson, who writes himself Armigero, in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, Armigero.
(1.1.1-11)
I begin my analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor by citing these passages because I am interested in the terms that the play's characters adopt and impose upon one another. As each passage's emphasis upon abuse indicates, insults are central to this process of naming the relationships among Windsor's inhabitants. Accounts of Renaissance slander and defamation cases and accounts of Renaissance shaming rituals, such as the skimmington and the charivari, describe how insults also were central to a larger process of establishing the shifting authority relations among state, local, and ecclesiastical officials.(2) By focusing on Shallow and Sir Hugh Evans--the play's justice of the peace and parson--and by focusing on the history of Windsor and of its castle, I locate the play's network of insults within this larger social process. Within this framework, I examine how Shakespeare's "abominable terms" promote collective identities--"townsmen" and "gentlemen"--which participate in Renaissance struggles over absolutism and between commercial and industrial capital precisely by helping to define the range of possible intersections between regional and national affiliations.
In order to outline the significance of the terms with which Shakespeare locates his characters within Windsor, I want to consider briefly the terms with which Shakespeare's critics have located the play within Renaissance struggles over class. Critics often describe the townspeople in The Merry Wives of Windsor as alternately "bourgeois" and "middle class." For example, Camille Wells Slights refers to Windsor as a "robustly middle-class world" that is populated by "ordinary bourgeois English men and women." Carol Thomas Neely refers to Windsor as "a thriving bourgeois town" that is populated by "the middle class." Jan Lawson Hinely analyzes Falstaff's relationship to this "middle class society" and its "bourgeois citizens." Peter Erickson cautions that any class analysis of the play must consider both Falstaff's and Fenton's relationship to Windsor's "bourgeois country folk"--the play's "middle class characters." Anne Barton writes that George Page, responding to Fenton, "displays the wariness of an English middle class accustomed . . . to the sexual maneuvers and depredations of an impoverished aristocracy." And, she explains, by rejecting the aristocratic Falstaff, Margaret Page and Alice Ford--unlike most middle class wives in contemporary city comedies--remain loyal to their husbands and to the "bourgeois community to which they belong." Sandra Clark also notes the wives' imperviousness both to a "gentleman-lover" and to his promises of upward social mobility. She writes that Margaret Page and Alice Ford "participate in the same code of bourgeois social values as their menfolk. . . . [Falstaff] underestimates both their intelligence and their loyalty to the ethic of the middle-class." Marvin Felheim and Philip Traci describe these women as, alternately, "rich bourgeoisie," "well-to-do middle-class types," and "attractive middle-class housewives."(3)
At first glance, this casual doubling of terminology might seem uncontroversial. As Immanuel Wallerstein explains, critics generally define members of the bourgeoisie either culturally (by their style of life and opportunities for consumption) or economically (by their relations to production and opportunities for investment). Whichever criteria they employ, they identify the bourgeoisie of Renaissance England as that feudal middle class that was neither nobility nor peasantry.(4) In keeping with this definition, Windsor's inhabitants locate themselves below that "too high a region" (3.2.73) where the noble Fenton "kept company with the wild prince and Poins" (3.2.72-73) and where the knightly Falstaff seems to have contracted his "dissolute disease" (3.3.191-92). And, in spite of Falstaff's boasting, those inhabitants do not prove to be the "peasant[s]" over whom he might "predominate" (2.2.282). Yet, as George K. Hunter has pointed out, although The Merry Wives of Windsor is often championed as one of Shakespeare's most "realistic" plays, its detailed descriptions of Windsor's inhabitants actually offer very little specific information about their relative material conditions or differing relations to production.(5) This is a persuasive claim. For example, Shakespeare critics roughly correlate the "bourgeoisie" or "middle class" depicted in the play with those whom members of Renaissance society increasingly labeled the "middling sort." This latter category generally designated property owners who might occupy a wide range of positions within the feudal and emerging capitalist modes of production.(6) The varied composition of this "middling sort" might account for critics' disagreement about the enemies against whom Windsor's inhabitants define themselves: the upper classes (Barton, Hinely), the aristocracy (Barton, Felheim and Traci, French, Hunter), predatory capitalists (Freedman), gallants (Clark), the nobility (Hinely, Hunter), courtiers (Bradbrook, Hinely, Hunter, Felheim and Traci), knights (Hinely, Hunter, Felheim and Traci), and the gentry (Clark, Hunter)--the latter a term that, as Bradbrook and Hinely admit, also applies to Windsor's bourgeois or middle-class inhabitants.(7) In short, as Hunter suggests, the play frustrates any consistent definition of its middling sort. In fact, I would argue, its network of insults emphasizes that this middle realm is actually constituted by multiple and often contradictory interests that critics' double terminology has helped to obscure.
My understanding of this contradictory middle realm has been influenced by recent accounts of late twentieth-century workers who are middle class not because they are positioned between the aristocracy and the peasantry but because, within the capitalist mode of production, they are neither entirely bourgeois nor entirely proletarian. These accounts are offered by economists and political theorists who locate their work within--or, at least, in dialogue with--a marxist tradition. These writers generally agree to label "middle class" those groups whose political alliances are especially uncertain because their economic interests coincide with the interests of both the exploiters and the exploited within any dominant mode of production. For example, in Britain and in the United States, these workers currently include small business owners who do not employ wage laborers, and the entire array of white collar workers.(8) Analyses of these particular laborers cannot be imported directly into late sixteenth-century England, of course. Yet I find this work helpful because the contradictory structural location of the middle class prompts each of these writers to consider, more generally, how political identities are produced and to reconsider the nature of political agency. For example, they ask how class struggle relates to other social struggles; when interests based on perceived common alliances coincide with those based on often unrecognized structural affiliations; under what conditions those affiliations become politically meaningful and thus available for organization into political alliances; how the political realm relates to the economic, to the social, or to the cultural; how we might distinguish not only among different objects of oppression but also among different structures of oppression; and under what conditions any group characterized by multiple and conflicting interests will pursue the more radical of its affiliations. Discussions of the middle class are particularly useful in sorting through these issues because, although they do not accord an inevitable primacy to economic exploitation, they do retain the category of exploitation and ask how its structure of oppression might intersect with other oppressive structures. Drawing upon these discussions, I argue that Shakespeare's middle class is not a thing to be defined but, instead, a process of constructing alliances among groups characterized by their simultaneous participation in very different structures of oppression and thus by their multiple and often contradictory potential short- and long-term interests. In the next section of this essay, I examine how Shakespeare's insults reinforce categories through which members of such groups might experience their political identities.
II
After Falstaff sends identical love letters to Alice Ford and to Margaret Page, sexual slander becomes Windsor's most prevalent form of insult. Recognizing Falstaff's missives as dangerous attacks upon their honesty, the women vow to avenge themselves upon "this unwholesome humidity, this gross wat'ry pumpion" and to "teach him to know turtles from jays" (3.3.40-42). Pistol warns Ford that Falstaff plans to seduce his wife and predicts that the cuckolded Ford will be compelled to adopt a particularly abominable term:...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
