Relationships in the Elizabethan theatre were less likely to be between husbands and wives than between patrons and clients.
When these homosocial bonds of gift and service come into conflict with the claims of marriage – as they do in the final movement of The Merchant of Venice, where Portia contrives to supplant Antonio as Bassanio’s principal benefactor – Shakespeare isn’t necessarily sympathetic to the conjugal.
This decentring of the marriage plot marks an important shift in perceptions of Shakespeare’s position within his culture, and indeed of that culture’s priorities. Rather than being first and foremost a Stratford bourgeois preoccupied with dowries and second-best beds, the Bard who emerges from studies is an assiduously networking professional, and one, furthermore, whose courtly aspirations and connections aren’t to be taken lightly.
Elizabethan England was far closer in spirit to the Rialto and its serious money
The Rialto is and has been for many centuries the financial and commercial centre of Venice)
than to Windsor and its merry wives.
It would appeat that in Shaekspeare's world literary and political circles were peopled by upstarts and would-be cosmopolitans, marketing their humanist skills across patronage networks which, structurally hostile to the domestic, operate in a dangerously ambiguous space somewhere between the professional, the amicable and the erotic.
In the Elizabethan culture of Shakespeare favours are reciprocated in cash, in books or in kind; rival factions exchange information among themselves by letter and in closets; while sycophants and sexually available apprentices rub shoulders and scratch backs with confidential secretaries and common players.
It was a culture preoccupied with status and interestingly clothes, , in which an internally inconsistent patriarchy is always under threat but always in place: a culture, nonetheless, in which certain outstanding women, partly or wholly crossdressed à la Portia, can achieve a sexily masculine success.
The familiar voice of the Shakespearean text does not come to us evenly over the passage of time,’ as pointed out by one critc wo in a slightly Portiaesque cadence points out,
‘it rises and falls in volume as it resonates (or fails to resonate) with our late 20th-century beliefs and preoccupations.'
When these homosocial bonds of gift and service come into conflict with the claims of marriage – as they do in the final movement of The Merchant of Venice, where Portia contrives to supplant Antonio as Bassanio’s principal benefactor – Shakespeare isn’t necessarily sympathetic to the conjugal.
This decentring of the marriage plot marks an important shift in perceptions of Shakespeare’s position within his culture, and indeed of that culture’s priorities. Rather than being first and foremost a Stratford bourgeois preoccupied with dowries and second-best beds, the Bard who emerges from studies is an assiduously networking professional, and one, furthermore, whose courtly aspirations and connections aren’t to be taken lightly.
Elizabethan England was far closer in spirit to the Rialto and its serious money
than to Windsor and its merry wives.
It would appeat that in Shaekspeare's world literary and political circles were peopled by upstarts and would-be cosmopolitans, marketing their humanist skills across patronage networks which, structurally hostile to the domestic, operate in a dangerously ambiguous space somewhere between the professional, the amicable and the erotic.
In the Elizabethan culture of Shakespeare favours are reciprocated in cash, in books or in kind; rival factions exchange information among themselves by letter and in closets; while sycophants and sexually available apprentices rub shoulders and scratch backs with confidential secretaries and common players.
It was a culture preoccupied with status and interestingly clothes, , in which an internally inconsistent patriarchy is always under threat but always in place: a culture, nonetheless, in which certain outstanding women, partly or wholly crossdressed à la Portia, can achieve a sexily masculine success.
The familiar voice of the Shakespearean text does not come to us evenly over the passage of time,’ as pointed out by one critc wo in a slightly Portiaesque cadence points out,
‘it rises and falls in volume as it resonates (or fails to resonate) with our late 20th-century beliefs and preoccupations.'
Smiles on the Face of Matter by Peter Cheevers (Kindle Edition -21 Nov 2011) - Kindle eBook
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501 Ways to Change Thinking Patterns (You Can't Add to an Infinity) by Peter Cheevers (Kindle Edition -26 Dec 2011) - Kindle eBook
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