ABSTRACT
While the night, as privileged stage for transgressions, is most readily associated with the Gothic imaginary, Shakespeare’s plays also deploy this chronotopos (Bakhtin 1984) as the domain for encounters and insights that fall outside the business of the everyday. Presaging a Gothic sensibility which will come into its own two centuries later, his comedies as well as his tragedies construct the night as site of refuge for lovers who seek to perform clandestine amorous rites. The nocturnal darkness supports the inflamed imagination and infection of these lovers’ eyes, encouraging them in their revolt against the symbolic laws of the day. Yet the night is not simply a lawless chronotopos. Rather, in it a different law comes into its own, namely that of fate. Thus, even though Shakespeare’s nocturnal world functions as one of our cultural imaginary’s most resilient heterotopias (Foucault 1998), a space where lovers can successfully contest paternal authority and give free reign to their fantasies, it is informed by its own law of necessity. Once Shakespeare’s lovers have left the realm of the ordinary and everyday, they must accept the course their transgressive desire takes, even as they insist that they could not have acted otherwise. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s nocturnal world the consequences of desire can not be avoided, regardless of whether they veer towards self-destruction or marital happiness (Cavell 1969). In the last act of The Merchant of Venice, Jessica and Lorenzo remind each
other of famous night scenes in the tragic love stories of antiquity, in order to insert their own transgression into this set of mythic texts. Disguised as a page, the daughter of the Jew Shylock had stolen from her home, so as to flee from her father’s protection as well as refute his religion. To mark the gravity of her betrayal, the night was so dark that although Jessica recognized the voice of her clandestine lover, she could not see him, and was thus compelled to ask for further proof of his identity. Yet at the time she
was grateful for the complete obscurity of the scene, because the darkness protected her from Lorenzo’s gaze. ‘I am much ashamed of my exchange’, she had explained to him, ‘but love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit’ (2.6.35). The absence of light, however, not only served to cover up her cross-dressing as a boy. The darkness also allowed her to hide her dual betrayal of her father – her willingness to convert to Christianity and the theft of his jewels and his gold. Precisely because she was well aware of her own guilt, she refused to serve as Lorenzo’s torchbearer. ‘What, must I hold a candle to my shames?’ she had declared, ‘They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light’ (2.6.42). By keeping her external appearance unseen, she had hoped to keep the double disownment of her gender – as a woman and as a Jewess – obscured. To allow the light of the torch to illuminate her person would have been tantamount to an ‘office of discovery’ (2.6.43), disclosing her moral transgression as well. A second act of concealment is at stake when, after her arrival in her
new home in Belmont, Jessica, in a scene poignantly illuminated by moonlight, seeks to translate the transgression she has committed into pure poetic language. During their lovers’ quarrel, Lorenzo and Jessica compare the scene in front of Shylock’s house with other scenes in literature, in which the obscurity of the night sets the tone for the fatal outcome of a clandestine romance. ‘In such a night as this’, Lorenzo begins, ‘Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, / And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents / Where Cressid lay that night’ (5.1.1-8). Jessica, in turn, recalls the night in which Thisbe, terrified by the appearance of a lion, runs away from the place where she promised to meet her lover, while Lorenzo counters with an image of Dido, standing on the wild sea bank, gazing in despair out to sea, because her lover Aeneas has abandoned her. After Jessica reminds them both that on such a night as this, Medea went to gather the enchanted herbs which successfully rejuvenated the father of her lover Jason, Lorenzo finally invokes their own nocturnal misdemeanour. ‘In such a night’, he exclaims, ‘did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew / And with an unthrift love did run from Venice / As far as Belmont’ (5.1.14-17). By competing in their descriptions of the emotional injuries they have
inflicted on each other, the two lovers transform themselves into literary characters. In retrospect Jessica recalls how Lorenzo stole her soul with false vows of faith, while he reminds her of how she slandered her love and he forgave her. In any rational light of day, these recollections would appear to be intolerable offences or fanciful delusions. Illuminated by moonlight, however, this verbal celebration of transgressive behaviour takes on the form of a jovial boast: ‘I would outnight you’ (5.1.23), Jessica
declares, before she is interrupted by the arrival of a friend. While Gothic sensibility in general dictates a correspondence between nocturnal scenes in literature and the work of fantasy, precisely because darkness encourages and sustains any flight into imaginary domains, Jessica and Lorenzo’s dialogue in the moonlit garden in Belmont performs a very specific passage. Because a night like the one they find themselves in is found to be the common denominator in a sequence of images commemorating fatal romantic transgressions, their entrance into the Parthenon of mythic texts is assured. Jessica and Lorenzo give birth to themselves as literary figures, yet do so by transcoding generically the texts they invoke. The outcome of their love nights is not tragic, even though – and therein lies the Gothic note of Shakespeare’s comedy solution – they change their shape, passing from mimetic figures appearing on stage in a particular drama to figures of poetic speech. Jessica and Lorenzo’s quarrel, however, also points to a seminal aspect
of Renaissance theatre practice, where the night was primarily performed linguistically. Plays were initially staged in daylight, in the middle of the afternoon. Any nocturnal mood, indeed any all-encompassing darkness, had to either be invoked through poetic language or dramatically indicated with the help of props like lanterns, candles or night clothes. As Marjorie Garber notes, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet the night functions as an interior world, ‘a middle world of transformation and dream sharply contrasted to the harsh daylight world of law, of civil war and banishment’, which is to say, it is ‘a state of theatre, and a state of mind’ (Garber 2004: 195). So as further to qualify the specifically Gothic sensibility of Shakespeare’s nocturnal world, it is useful to recall how in our cultural imaginary, the theatre of the Renaissance itself has come to stand for a particularly resilient heterotopia. On Shakespeare’s stage – in the middle of the ordinary everyday, yet on the margin of London’s jurisdiction – the law of the imagination overrules the symbolic order’s law of rationality and obedience (Montrose 1998). The heterotopic quality of theatre, however, continues to resonate beyond its historic moment of emergence, particularly when the nocturnal scenes performed on stage present actions that explicitly break with the harsh laws of the day by privileging the work of fantasy. Two plays by Shakespeare, both written around 1595, illustrate this
juxtaposition of nocturnal scene and psychic scenario. Both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream enact the rite-de-passage of disobedient lovers, lovers who transgress the strict forbiddances of paternal authority by fleeing into the night and, concomitant with this, into a Gothic state of mind. In both plays the lovers privilege their fantasy of love over the symbolic conventions forbidding it. As stage and state of mind, the night in both
cases represents a commentary on, and an alternative to, the day. The violence of the young Montagues and Capulets mirrors the ancient grudge of their parents and turns this hatred into the Gothic enactment of a death-marked love, the consequences of which none of the survivors can ignore. The violent peregrinations of the Athenian lovers in the nocturnal wood, in turn, contest the relentlessly severe paternal law of Athens which punishes disobedient daughters by sending them to a nunnery or to the scaffold. The confusion that ensues will ultimately end in an acknowledgement of Hermia’s right to choose her own husband. The two plays, furthermore, can be read as tragic and comic variations
on the same story. Owing to chance, the lovers in both plays suddenly find themselves separated from each other, thus revealing the fickleness of any love based on a magic infection of the eye. Moreover, the coincidences that change the course of action in both plays render visible the speed with which romantic desire can turn into hatred and violence. Precisely because both plays mirror each other, however, one must interrogate the different resolutions Shakespeare finds for these nocturnal passages, dictated by the demands of genre. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers, on the morning after their nocturnal adventures, sleeping peacefully next to each other. Why can all three couples celebrate their nuptials at the end of the next day, while Romeo and Juliet consistently veer towards an eternal night, so that their corpses are discovered by the Prince in the gloomy light of dawn, lying in a deadly embrace in the vault of Juliet’s forefathers? What attitude towards the night must one assume in order to be able to leave this stage and state of mind? Which knowledge, won in the night, can be transported into the day? Which insight must once again be repressed?
