ABSTRACT
The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night all tease their audiences with the perfect symmetry of comic form, and then mock the expectations that they have created. After a prolonged ritual of gender norming, Taming summarizes its point in a lecture delivered by a boy actor who addresses the women in his audience as “unable worms” (5.2.173), an insult that is followed by a celebratory kiss between the boy actor/woman character and her husband, and an expression of doubt from a minor character who wonders whether the action of the play truly matches the neatness of its explication: “’Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so” (5.2.193). As You Like It sends a perfectly constructed erotic hierarchy of four clearly ranked couples off to the altar, and then allows the boy actor to ask the audience to imagine something completely diff erent: “If I were a woman” (Epi. 14). Twelfth Night pairs off its main characters with such structural precision and absence of individual motivation that both a fi ancé and a fi ancée persist, to the end of the play, in calling their prospective spouses by the same fi ctional name, Cesario, but the perfect resolution is so fragile that it runs off into seemingly random events: a secondary character threatens to ruin everyone’s life, the clown sings a song, and the show is over. In each of these plays, as a recognizable comic plot approaches closure, it undermines its generic promise, that it is possible to imagine a world in which the happiest people somehow deserve their good fortune. Working in the sunniest of genres, Shakespeare plunges his comic characters into zero-sum games in which the best one can hope for is an uncertain ending, and so that is what we get.
