“To be slow in words is a woman's only virtue”: Silence and Satire in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1994)

The written texts of three Shakespearean comedies feature a significant silence by the comic heroine as she enters the married state at the end of the play. Beatrice, in the final scene of Much Ado About Nothing, has her mouth stopped by Benedick’s kiss and never says another word. Isabella, at the conclusion of Measure for Measure, does not reply to the Duke’s marriage proposal, nor does she ever speak again afterwards. And Silvia of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in perhaps the most puzzling sequence of all, is passed back and forth between her would-be rapist (Proteus), her father (the Duke), and her lover (Valentine), all without uttering a sound. Modern feminist critics have taken these silences to connote a hierarchical subordination of these women to patriarchal authority, which has led them to question the value of reproducing such events through dramatic performance. As Kathleen McLuskie notes,

[G]iven that feminism is a movement committed to a change in relations of power between men and women and to an analysis of the fundamentally oppressive character of patriarchy, it might seem that the movement has little to hope for from a drama in which marriage is a happy ending and the subordination if not the oppression of most women is a necessary element for the continuation of peace and love and quiet life…. Feminism, it seems, could only deplore the continued representation of women in such forms and such contexts. (Renaissance 5)

However, as McLuskie realizes, the indeterminate nature of dramatic texts allows theatrical personnel to shape a play’s reception by spectators through unorthodox performance choices. Elsewhere, she writes that

sexist meanings are not fixed but depend upon constant reproduction by their audience…. [T]he text is tied to misogynist meaning only if it is reconstructed with its emotional power and its moral imperatives intact. Yet the text contains possibilities for subverting these meanings and the potential for reconstructing them in feminist terms. (“Patriarchal” 95)

Assuming McLuskie is correct, one task of feminist performance criticism might be to explore the specific means by which the subversion and reconstruction of the text’s sexist meanings can be accomplished.