Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

Camille Slights brings an original voice to the study of Shakespeare’s
ten 16th-century comedies, which, for the most part, have been
overlooked in terms of what they reveal about human community formation.
While her book bears some affinity to recent “new historicist”
analyses, a particular value of her approach is its repositioning of
individual agency, something that historicized research often overlooks.

Slights’s basic argument is that people in Shakespeare’s comedies
manage social disorder in order to resolve dissent in favor of
“satisfying completion.” On the surface, this analysis appears to be
merely another restatement of an older criticism of the Northrop Frye
variety. Where Slights emerges as a provocative revisionist is in her
detailing of the ways in which Shakespeare’s comedies—especially his
comic heroines—incorporate principles of absurdity, inconsistency, and
contradiction.

In addition to offering new insights into Shakespeare’s art of
accommodation, Slights also communicates the difficulty of opposing a
canonized critical tradition that values coherence over contingency. In
her chapter on The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, she interprets
Katherina’s submission to Petruchio and patriarchy not as a loss of
self but as an anticipation of the Lockean theory of a contractual basis
for marriage. In part, this reading stems from her reluctance to view
Petruchio’s “unremitting offers of affection” as merely a subtler
form of coercion than his other tactic (enforced starvation), a
disturbing parallel that the play asks us to draw. Indeed, Slights’s
endorsement of the positive values of “contractual” relationships
and her conclusion that the play “presents us with an image of a
society that conforms to all the members’ individual desires” fail
to consider that contracts do not necessarily involve free agency and
that “desire” is less a self-generated manifestation of the will
than an ideologically fraught locus of social (re)production.

Despite its overly optimistic representation of autonomous agency, this
work is a valuable starting point for further studies into the
production of individual and community identity.