ABSTRACT
Shakespearean comedy uses the mental space represented by the blazon and rejected by the state's interpellation of the masculine subject to enter into the presence of femininity stripped of patriarchal thinking. The isolated lyric voice of sonnets has, perhaps, contributed to the notion that blazons were unconscious fantasies on the part of the reader as well as the poet. By staging multiple gazes, Shakespearean comedies lay bare blazons as male fantasies and, as such, open up a differential space that challenges male thinking on femininity. In Shakespearean comedy, this second type of double exposure, the opening up of male interiority to the beloved's gaze, repudiates the lover's phantasm, but doesn't always reject the blazon wholesale. Whereas the medical gaze pathologizes male fantasy in order to advance a certain kind of patriarchal interiority, the beloved's gaze exposes and dispels male fantasy on the grounds that it fails to capture the thought of femininity.
