On of these moments comes in The Comedy of Errors (Act III, Scene 2), when Antipholus of Syracuse shamelessly hits on Luciana, the sister of his alleged wife. The scene is charged with a lot of romantic language and coy refutations; however sweet these verses may be, Luciana still believes that she is speaking to the husband of her sister. Though it is true that from Antipholus of Syracuse's point of view he is only flirting with a single mistress, the breath of adultery and sordid desire still obfuscate the scene. The audience is simultaneously being affronted with AoS's sexuality as well as Luciana's contemptible response to AoS's advances.
Luc: It is a fault that springeth from your eye.
AoS: For gazing on your beams, fair sun, being by.
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| Well, at least she said no that time. |
AoS: As good to wink, sweet love, as look on night.
Luc: Why call you me “love”? Call my sister so.
AoS: Thy sister's sister.
Luc: That's my sister.
AoS: No, it is thyself, mine own self’s better part,
Mine eye’s clear eye, my dear heart’s dearer heart,
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope’s aim,
My sole earth’s heaven, and my heaven’s claim...
Luc: O soft, sir! Hold you still.
I’ll fetch my sister to get her goodwill.
(III. 2. 55-64, 69-70.)
Alas, Luciana does spurn AoS's advances. That's good, right? She couldn't possibly hope to score her brother-in-law right after giving a speech about how wives should be obedient; one can only assume not facilitating cheating is something that is expected from a potential good-wife. However, this scene also reveals to the audience that AoS is attracted to Luciana, and would court her if not for the ubiquitous, eponymous errors running amok. Shakespeare keeps playing with the sexualities of his contemporary audience: at this point in the play, the spectators would have wanted—gasp!—Luciana to return his advances. They know that she is right in following what her sexuality is telling her (namely, that she is attracted to this flirtatious Antipholus), and yet it is expected that she turn him down. Luckily, all of these libidinous desires get properly aligned as the play enters its denouement.
The Taming of the Shrew also puts its audience on a roller coaster of sexuality—this time through witty word play. One of the more famously salacious scenes in Shrew is, like the aforementioned scene in The Comedy of Errors, a courting scene. When Petruchio begins to court Katherina, she acts as expected: shrewish. Spurring even the most basic of his advances, Petruchio calls her waspish, to which Katherina famously replies:
"If I be waspish, best beware my sting." (II. i. 208.)Oh-ho-ho! Petruchio follows up on this suggestive warning, spurning the following dialogue:
P: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
K: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
P: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
K: In his tongue.
P: Whose tongue?
K: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
P: What, with my tongue in your tail? (II. i. 209-214.)
The "tail" being referred to is believed to be an overt reference to Katherina's genitalia. Petruchio appeals to Katherina's sexuality directly in an attempt to deflect and undermine her shrewish defenses.
To juxtapose these sexually charged dialogues with one from our quasi-contemporary culture, below is one of the most famous "patter-dialogues" of the film noir genre, coming from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity:
Here is a dialogue where sexuality and its repression are being volleyed verbally. This dialogue from the 1944 "pragmatic film noir" is incredibly similar in form to Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse's banter, though centuries separate the two. Katherina and Petruchio's dialogue is surprisingly more salacious than the other two combined; Luciana and AoS's dialogue, as well as the dialogue from Double Indemnity, both deal with sexually charged suggestion but any reference to sexuality is clouded with the threat of adultery.
Most interestingly, it is how those two dialogues get un-clouded that reveal the most about how sexuality was treated in these two eras: in The Comedy of Errors, Luciana and Antipholus end up together happily. Despite Luciana's initial rejection of her sexuality, it ends up that after all, it was pointing it in the right direction. Conversely, in Double Indemnity, Walter Neff listens to his sexuality and begins an affair with Phyllis soon after this scene. However, this leads him down a road of broken promises, murder, and death.
Now, in which era was sexuality more repressed?
This exploration of the libidinal dynamics (both licensed and un-) of these two early comedies captures not just the early modern willingness to play with sexualities and sexual identities, but also an overriding concern with audience interpretation--a concern that approaches the maniacal in Milton's Paradise Lost. The Luciana - Antipholus S scene diffuses responsibility for bawdy reading in ways that implicate the audience in a moral double bind. What are the characters supposed to desire? How does the audience align its expectations accordingly? The tongue/tail repartee plays with the anatomical indeterminacy between the boy actor and the female character, suggesting that Katherine's "wit" is both intellectual and anatomical, and also placing non-reproductive (i.e. sodomitical) sexual desire in tension with the marital plot. How do we confront the irreducible fact of sexual desire in the play? What dispensations are available? Where does pleasure belong? Whose pleasure is it?
ReplyDeleteFor reasons that will be clear soon, your choice of film clip is uncannily apt because, like TOTS and MOV it takes up questions of supposition and meaning that show just how powerfully sexuality works as a figure for related questions of meaning and identity.
I wish more authors of this type of content would take the time you did to research and write so well. I am very impressed with your vision and insight.
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