Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare, text and paratext
- The popularity of Shakespeare in print
- The continuing importance of new Bibliographical method
- ‘Honour the real thing’: Shakespeare, Trauma and Titus Andronicus in South Africa
- ‘O, these encounterers’: on Shakespeare’s meetings and partings
- A play of modals: Grammar and potential action in early Shakespeare
- Merry, marry, Mary: Shakespearian wordplay and Twelfth Night
- A subtle point: Sleeves, tents and ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ (again)
- The look of Othello
- Red button Shakespeare
- ‘Mark you / his absolute shall?’: Multitudinous tongues and contested words in Coriolanus
- Chagall’s Tempest: An autobiographical reading
- Reading illustrated editions: Methodology and the limits of interpretation
- Close encounters with Anne Brontë's Shakespeare
- Shakespeare and the magic lantern
- Shakespeare and the coconuts: close encounters in post-apartheid South Africa
- The Schrödinger effect: Reading and misreading performance
- Behind the scenes
- Inner monologues: Realist acting and/as Shakespearian performance text
- More japanized, casual and transgender shakespeares
- Translation futures: Shakespearians and the foreign text
- After translation
- ‘The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet’s heart and the early modern subject
- Mapping King Lear
- ‘Last on the stage’: The place of Shakespeare in Charles Darwin’s ethology
- Sense/memory/sense-memory: Reading narratives of Shakespearian rehearsals
- Shakespeare performances in England (and Wales), 2008
- Professional Shakespeare productions in the British Isles, January–December 2007
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in performance
- 3a Editions and textual studies
- 3b Editions and textual studies
- Index to Volume 62
Merry, marry, Mary: Shakespearian wordplay and Twelfth Night
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare, text and paratext
- The popularity of Shakespeare in print
- The continuing importance of new Bibliographical method
- ‘Honour the real thing’: Shakespeare, Trauma and Titus Andronicus in South Africa
- ‘O, these encounterers’: on Shakespeare’s meetings and partings
- A play of modals: Grammar and potential action in early Shakespeare
- Merry, marry, Mary: Shakespearian wordplay and Twelfth Night
- A subtle point: Sleeves, tents and ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ (again)
- The look of Othello
- Red button Shakespeare
- ‘Mark you / his absolute shall?’: Multitudinous tongues and contested words in Coriolanus
- Chagall’s Tempest: An autobiographical reading
- Reading illustrated editions: Methodology and the limits of interpretation
- Close encounters with Anne Brontë's Shakespeare
- Shakespeare and the magic lantern
- Shakespeare and the coconuts: close encounters in post-apartheid South Africa
- The Schrödinger effect: Reading and misreading performance
- Behind the scenes
- Inner monologues: Realist acting and/as Shakespearian performance text
- More japanized, casual and transgender shakespeares
- Translation futures: Shakespearians and the foreign text
- After translation
- ‘The single and peculiar life’: Hamlet’s heart and the early modern subject
- Mapping King Lear
- ‘Last on the stage’: The place of Shakespeare in Charles Darwin’s ethology
- Sense/memory/sense-memory: Reading narratives of Shakespearian rehearsals
- Shakespeare performances in England (and Wales), 2008
- Professional Shakespeare productions in the British Isles, January–December 2007
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in performance
- 3a Editions and textual studies
- 3b Editions and textual studies
- Index to Volume 62
Summary
’marry, that “marry” is the very theme’ : comedy and marry-age
Marriage and merriment form two points in a triangular configuration of meaning in Shakespearian comedy. The importance of the first term is well attested to in recent criticism. In Catherine Bate’s phrase, Shakespearian comedies are about courtship ‘if they are about anything’: ‘Men and women meet, match, marry and mate. This is the eternal story which Shakespeare’s comedies retell again and again.’ Understood as ‘wit’, merriment’s place within Shakespearian comedy is, if anything, still more critically established. Samuel Johnson famously (if too negatively) observed it in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765):
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
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- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 81 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009