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Shakespeare’s Widows (review)

126 No direct evidence of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions as a writer have survived, so this is conjecture, however well founded. Does it make sense to see Twelfth Night as a culmination of Shakespearean comedy, unrelated to more problematic comedies such as Measure for Measure or All’s Well? In some ways it does, but interpreting the plays and Shakespeare’s career in this way comes more from a critic’s hunch than any historical evidence. To see Shakespeare’s comic drama ending in the confusions, ironies, and uncertainties of All’s Well rather than the transcendent moment of Twelfth Night weakens Ryan’s thesis that the comedies are primarily utopian, designed to give the fallen audience glimpses of the golden world. As well, chronology is asserted, rather than debated. There has been endless controversy over the dating and ordering of Shakespeare’s plays, but Ryan not only assumes a clear order exists, but also frequently makes detailed arguments based on the ordering, as if it were an agreed-upon fact that Comedy of Errors and Taming of the Shrew predated Two Gentlemen of Verona. (The Norton Shakespeare, in the meantime, assumes the order to be the reverse: Two Gentlemen, then Taming, then Comedy of Errors.)2 Ryan is a respected and perceptive interpreter of Shakespeare, and it is no small praise to say that his readings of the comedies are valuable in precisely the ways those of Samuel Johnson or Hazlitt are valuable—not because they are “right” or because they are supported by piles of research, but because they are the record of an insightful, serious, opinionated reader’s engagement with the plays. His analysis of the multifaceted use of the word “fashion” in Much Ado is wonderful, as is his discussion of “gentleness” in As You Like It. And who knows? It may well be that from the point of view of “a world whipped by the wind and lashed by the rain” (273) (the world of history?) one may from time to time glimpse something golden in Twelfth Night.