Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T19:05:44.708Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Comedy and sex

from Part 2 - Shakespearean comedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Alexander Leggatt
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access

Summary

In the opening scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona the title characters have an abstract, literary debate about love, introducing their ideas with the formula “writers say” (1.1.43, 46).1 The principal lovers at the beginning of the play are Proteus and Julia, who communicate by letter and whom we never see together until Act 2 scene 2, when they are forced to part. Love seems a matter of words, disembodied and unfulfilled, all theory and no practice. In Act 2 scene 5, however, Launce, the play's principal clown, gives a different view of it. When his colleague Speed asks about Proteus and Julia, “how stands the matter with them?” Launce replies, “Marry, thus: when it stands well with him, it stands well with her” (19-21). In our era, sex has been as relentlessly theorized as any human activity. For Shakespeare's clowns it is a simple, practical matter. There is nothing to debate, though there may be something to illustrate: elsewhere in the scene Launce uses his staff as a comic prop; he could use it here.

Launce’s name, a variant spelling of “lance,” makes this sort of comedy appropriate to him. Moreover, he is accompanied in his major scenes by his dog Crab. It is not just that sex brings out the animal in humanity, though Shakespeare uses that idea elsewhere: Falstaff appears for his final encounter with the wives of Windsor as a stag at rutting-time, and in Cymbeline Posthumus imagines that Jachimo in bed with Imogen “Like a full-acorned boar . . . / Cried ‘O!’ and mounted” (2.5.16–17).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×