{"id":297,"date":"2012-10-02T18:46:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T18:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=297"},"modified":"2013-06-08T00:33:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-08T00:33:49","slug":"leisure-idleness-and-virtuous-activity-in-shakespearean-drama","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/volume-ii-2008\/leisure-idleness-and-virtuous-activity-in-shakespearean-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"Leisure, Idleness, and Virtuous Activity in Shakespearean Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unhae Langis, Slippery Rock University<\/em><\/p>\n

The topoi<\/em> leisure and idleness abound in Shakespearean drama in complex manifestations, replete with class and gender inflections. The privileged term, leisure, modeled after Greek skol\u00e9<\/em>, refers to the \u201copportunity afforded by freedom from occupations\u201d (OED 2a), as enjoyed by the nobles who, excused from sustenance labor, could ideally devote themselves to \u201cthe development of virtue and the performance of political duties\u201d (Aristotle, Politics<\/em> VII.9.1328b33-a2). The second term, idleness, targeting class and gender inferiors, connotes inertia, indolence, overindulgence, and triviality, readily associated with unemployment and the less strenuous activities of domestic work. Thus, when Flavius scolds a group of commoners loitering in public as \u201cidle creatures\u201d (Julius Caesar<\/em>, 1.1.1),1 he means that the mechanicals are \u201cunemployed\u201d or \u201cnot engaged in work\u201d (OED 4a), insinuating \u201claziness\u201d and \u201cindolence\u201d (OED 6). Shakespeare further mines the multivalence of \u201cidleness\u201d in Antony and Cleopatra<\/em>. When Cleopatra objects to Antony\u2019s return to Rome, expressing she is \u201call forgotten,\u201d Antony quips, \u201cBut that your royalty\/ Holds idleness your subject, I should take you\/ For idleness itself.\u201d (1.3.92-94). Here, \u201cidleness\u201d implies not only that Cleopatra lacks meaningful occupation, but also that her complaint, from Antony\u2019s perspective of pursuing state matters of gravitas<\/em>, is \u201cempty\u201d; \u201cineffective, worthless, … vain, frivolous, trifling\u201d; \u201cfoolish, silly, incoherent; …delirious; and, finally, \u201cbaseless, groundless\u201d (OED 1, 2a-c). In a third usage of \u201cidleness,\u201d when the Athenian couples in Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> confront love troubles in the forest, they experience firsthand the dangers, illusions, and vanities of \u201clove-in-idleness\u201d (2.1.180). Here, Shakespeare draws on the Ovidian connection of idleness with fleshly delight, as conveyed
\nby the medieval tradition of the garden of love, notably guarded by Oiseuse in the Romance de la Rose<\/em>, and signified by the conventional Gothic symbols of luxuria<\/em>, the mirror and the comb (Vickers 118). As these examples indicate, Shakespeare draws on a rich classical discourse of idleness and leisure, the discussion of which will aid our understanding of how he borrows from and revises past uses of these topoi<\/em> towards further aesthetic and ethical aims.<\/p>\n

As Julia Bondanella explains, the specialized Greek and Latin conceptions of idleness and leisure differ widely in their connotations. While the \u201cGreek skol\u00e9<\/em> refers to a meaningful experience in which the mind is exercised on the liberal arts in order to contemplate truth and to achieve some concrete good in the world\u201d (15, n. 9), the Roman otium<\/em> reveals \u201ca long, ambivalent history, with definitions ranging from the idleness that encourages vice to a condition in which one cultivates intellectual or spiritual gifts to achieve virtue\u201d (14). Specifically, otium<\/em> is<\/p>\n

time free from work (labor<\/em>), from business dealings (negotium), <\/em>from the performance of duties (officia), <\/em>or from political, administrative, or military service. But it is also defined by the \u00e9lite in relation to how the non-\u00e9lite are thought to spend (or indeed waste) their free time: a wise man\u2019s otium <\/em>is empty of work and other obligations but full of purposeful and productive contemplation, rest, or literary activity. (Connors 493, Andr\u00e9 21)<\/p>\n

Because citizens often lacked the wherewithal to spend \u201ctime at one\u2019s own disposal\u201d (OED 3a) in productive and worthy ways, the word became more often associated with \u201cidleness, laziness, luxuriousness, and voluptuousness\u201d (Bondanella 15).<\/p>\n

The first recorded use of otium<\/em>, in Ennius\u2019 Iphigenia<\/em> (c. 190 BC), reveals soldiers expressing their restlessness and boredom during a respite from fighting. To wit, they \u201cdistinguish between otium negotiosum<\/em>, leisure with a satisfying occupation … and otium otiosum<\/em>, unoccupied and pointless leisure\u201d (Vickers 6). According to Cato, the famous moralist, farmer, lawyer, orator, and general, unproductive otium<\/em> was \u201cunworthy of a Roman, who should be busy and avoid the temptations of the easy life, which, for many Romans, meant \u201cotium Graecum<\/em>, Roman prejudice against the [defeated] Greeks ascribing to them the antithesis of their own virtus<\/em>\u201d: \u201cThe Greeks were over-talkative, guilty of levitas<\/em> (frivolity), softness, laziness, being dedicated to purely intellectual activities without practical outcome\u201d (Vickers 7). In the context of statecraft, otium<\/em>, meaning civil peace, was a legitimate and desirable goal for states overly involved in internal and external strife, but a wholesome and productive peace within the polity was difficult to maintain. In his speech Pro Rhodiensibus<\/em>, Cato expresses a view, endorsed later by Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and Tacitus (32-36), that \u201ctoo much prosperity would lead to superbia<\/em> and luxuria<\/em>, an associations of vices which would cause a people\u2019s decline\u201d (7). Indeed, otium<\/em> came to be widely regarded as a cause of all evil, bringing on a chain of perceived vices \u2014 luxury, self-indulgence, pleasure, idleness, and wantonness. These vices induced a person\u2019s physical and moral degeneration, lessoned against through Cato\u2019s metaphor of corrosive rust for inactivity or through milder language of being \u201csoftened by luxury\u201d (8,7,32).<\/p>\n

Because of its potential for abuse, Roman otium<\/em> presents itself largely in admonitory terms, and those who used it in honorable ways had to invoke exceptions. Cicero defended his political inactivity during his exile through the fruits of his otium honestum<\/em> for the benefit of others: his works in philosophy and rhetoric which subsequently catalyzed Renaissance humanist thought (10). Besides the writers\u2019 invocation of otium literatum<\/em> (lettered ease) as honorable use of free time (Bondanella 19), politicians who have contributed to public service might invoke otium cum dignitate<\/em>, by which \u201caristocratic republicans [may claim they] have earned dignitas or public renown by their efforts for the republic as a whole and should now be able to enjoy the otium [albeit productive] which goes with a state running smoothly\u201d (Vickers 9).<\/p>\n

The widely cautionary attitude towards otium<\/em> continued into the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance as Jerome to Spenser regarded otium<\/em> as a radix malorum<\/em>, \u201cthe enemy of virtue, the associate of all forms of sin\u201d (Vickers 116), if misused. At a macrocosmic level, Machiavelli, drawing on Polybius, pointedly places otium<\/em> (\u201cquiet,\u201d \u201cidleness\u201d) at the core of a cyclical rise and fall of nations: \u201cWarre begetteth quiet, quiet occasioneth idlenesse, Idleness breedeth disorder, Disorder maketh ruine: Likewise of ruine growth order, order virtue, and of virtue, glorie with good fortune\u201d (V, i; p. 111); [qtd. in Vickers 137]. At a microcosmic level, Edmund Spenser, in Book I of The Faerie Queene<\/em>, presents otium<\/em> (\u201cease\u201d) as a danger to Red Cross through assonance and rhyme: \u201cSleepe after toile, port after stormie seas,\/ Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please\u201d (1.4.40). This \u201cinvitation to rest, to indulge the senses,\u201d as Vickers emphatically notes, \u201cis tantamount to suicide\u201d (149).<\/p>\n

One would infer from these reverberations an almost univocal censure of otium<\/em> were it not for the Roman poets who sought otium<\/em> as the necessary condition for pursuing love and for writing elegiacs on love. The most famous of these, Ovid, overturned standard conceptions of otium<\/em> and love as inactive by emphasizing its need for activity: \u201cInertia may be the characteristic of the lover viewed from the perspective of public morality, but within the love affair he must be anything but passive\u201d (Vickers 21). Whereas even Ovid, unable to free himself from Roman gravitas<\/em>, both celebrated and denounced otium<\/em> (24), the Renaissance seized on Ovidian vitality and transgression of conventional morality, evident in his love treatises and poetry as well as in Metamorphoses<\/em>, to construct the chief countermodel against the dominant, androcentric ideal of martial and civic action.<\/p>\n

Depicting both dominant and resistant ethical discourses in his drama, Shakespeare presents a complex exploration of idleness, leisure, and virtuous activity. Reflecting the Roman teachings influential during the Renaissance, the dominant, androcentric view in Shakespearean drama, on the one hand, extols martial and civil activity over \u201cidleness,\u201d the negative facet of Roman otium<\/em>. At the same time, by revising this concept within its particular uses, Shakespeare recuperates the activity of the economically and sexually disenfranchised\u2014women and the working class. Shakespeare, on the other hand, endorses aristocratic leisure, the positive facet of otium<\/em>\u2014but this support is critically qualified. Subtly criticizing the nobles\u2019 potential to abuse an inherited, not merited prerogative of leisure, Shakespeare holds them more stringently to its \u201cpurposeful and productive\u201d use within the classical context of public service. In this manner Shakespeare\u2019s plays deftly revise the dominant early modern ideology of work, privileging male over female, noble over commoner, to validate less visible, internal activity alongside privileged physical, external activity.<\/p>\n

Both women and the working class comprise two groups of people largely excluded from the classical ideal of activity as martial valor and political occupation, the first by way of prohibition and the second by way of misconstrual. In an alliance of class and gender inferiors, Shakespeare presents two correlated correctives to the ancient and Renaissance ideal of civic and martial activity. One valorizes feminine idleness, as epitomized by Cleopatra and Virgilia, as the locus of vital internal and domestic life instead of seeming inactivity or passivity. The other, in juxtaposing patrician leisure against plebeian laziness, validates the plebeians\u2019 and the mechanicals\u2019 earnest work over aristocratic idleness in Coriolanus<\/em> and Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, respectively. Through these counterresponses, leisure is no longer simply the time, often misused, for male gentility to train for martial and political activity, but rather extended to include the \u201cthe business of [the] soul\u201d (Othello<\/em>, 3.3.185), domestic bonding, and community building in which especially women and commoners participate through their daily work and holiday reveling.<\/p>\n

I.<\/p>\n

Among the women living in the heroic worlds of Shakespearean drama, notably Portia, Cleopatra, and Virgilia of the Roman tragedies react to the exclusion from the masculine sphere of laudable activity in diverse ways. Portia, excluded from Brutus\u2019s confidence and thereby the conspiratorial intrigue of male politics, achieves recognition within the Roman heroic society as an honorary male only at the price of life\u2014through her Stoic act of suicide. Although also ultimately taking her life in the \u201chigh Roman fashion\u201d (Antony and Cleopatra<\/em> 4.16.89), Cleopatra demonstrates throughout the play a deft integration of feminine and masculine, emotional and martial modes of action, culminating in her heroic death. In Cleopatra\u2019s circumstance, female subordination underscores the dependent status of Egypt to Rome. As a tributary ruler, Cleopatra tries to deploy feminine wiles to political advantage\u2014all in vain. Antony, taken suddenly by a mood of Roman gravitas<\/em>, sees Cleopatra\u2019s otherwise charming actions of \u201cinfinite variety\u201d (2.2.241) as idleness\u2014empty, vain, trifling, and foolish (OED 1, 2a- b). According to Roman ethics, strength, \u201cif unused, easily melts into softness and impotence\u201d (Vickers 32). Immersed in the pleasures of love at the Egyptian court, Antony is called back to Rome and all she stands for\u2014male hardness and activity. Heeding the Roman censure against otium<\/em>, he realizes: \u201cThese strong Egyptians fetters I must break,\/ Or lose myself in dotage\u201d (1.2.105-06), in which case, \u201cTen thousand harms more than the ills I know\/ My idleness [will] hatch\u201d (118-19). Clouded by Roman ideology, Antony mistakenly sees Cleopatra as harmful to his Roman honor when she, in fact, has aided him all along to achieve what is ultimately more satisfying than the narrow life of virtus<\/em>: a complete life integrating duty and love, honor and power. But as a tributary ruler and a woman, Cleopatra\u2019s power is painfully circumscribed.<\/p>\n

Though Antony and other Romans would accuse Cleopatra of idleness, her inactivity is not one of her making, but rather one imposed upon her by her sex and by political dependency. Appearing censurably \u201cidle\u201d to Roman eyes, Cleopatra\u2019s epicurean lifestyle and extravagant play of passions are largely means to stave off the boredom of political exclusion. The Roman tendency myopically to regard the effect rather than the larger external cause of Cleopatra\u2019s idleness disables them also from understanding her potent inner life. Cleopatra\u2019s \u201cidleness\u201d expresses the frustrations of a tributary ruler treated as a casualty in the strategies of male politics, \u201cesteemed as nothing\u201d in the light of \u201ca great cause\u201d (1.2.127): her sexual inferiority contributes to and reinforces her political dependency as Egypt. Conflating sexual and political discourses, Cleopatra\u2019s \u201ctawny front\u201d (1.1.6) casting a \u201cshadow\u201d on Antony\u2019s \u201csun\u201d (4.16.9) encapsulates the Roman critique against \u201cprivate life, effeminacy, selfishness, idleness and vice\u201d in favor of \u201cpublic life, manliness, virtue, hard work\u201d (Vickers 25).<\/p>\n

Instead of contemptible inactivity, Cleopatra\u2019s \u201cidleness\u201d reveals itself as bounded vitality and powerful sentience in her pursuit of love and power combined, that \u201cheavenly mingle\u201d (1.5.58). Our modern discourse, influenced by the classical and Protestant bias towards visible, external industry, perhaps lacks sufficient language to discuss the potent operations of the inner life in their rapport with external action. Aristotle\u2019s virtue ethics, with its integration of worthy aim and effective response (affect and\/or action) towards that end, may be of use in this discussion of Cleopatra\u2019s \u201cidleness.\u201d Judging by Antony\u2019s later action of reuniting with Cleopatra and proclaiming her and their children rulers of the East (3.6.9-16), Cleopatra, in act 1 seems to have reacted to Antony\u2019s departure with the right degree of affect combined with deferential submission to\u2014hence, non-action against\u2014his decided course of action. Cleopatra\u2019s emotional restraint and endurance of inactivity is the right response of \u201csensation, reason, desire,\u201d the \u201cthree things in the soul,\u201d according to Aristotle, \u201cwhich control action and truth\u201d (Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>, henceforth NE<\/em>, VI.2.1139a16). In choosing this response, Cleopatra displays the mark of the virtuous person: practical wisdom, or the ability \u201cto deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself\u201d (VI.5.1140a25-27; my italics). This calculation of moral action based on \u201cratiocinative desire\u201d (VI.2.1139a4)\u2014the integrated operation of both intellect and emotion\u2014is not easy, and demands, as Cleopatra briefly hints, \u201csweating labour\/ To bear so near the heart\u201d (1.3.95-96). Expanded in these terms, Cleopatra\u2019s action in inaction, preparing for her future political participation, is not so alien from the Roman conception of \u201cpurposeful and productive\u201d otium<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Whereas a moral system like the Roman one based on discipline and restraint, honor and shame, conceives value through pain and forbearance, Cleopatra is the integration of Eastern and Western thought, an incarnation of the Egyptian-Greco hermetic and neoplatonic traditions, in which apparent diversities are manifestations of the One (Wind 42). In this dispensation, dualities of the Roman world\u2014play and work, mirth and grief, idleness and \u201csweating labour\u201d\u2014 as Cleopatra vividly enacts them, are part and parcel of a cohesive \u201cbecoming\u201d (1.3.97), all affirmed as ongoing vital motion and emotion towards the fulfillment of complete life. Cleopatra\u2019s failure at deflecting Antony in act 1 from the narrow Roman path of imperial glory eventually leads to brief, exquisite scenes of \u201cheavenly mingle\u201d in act 4, where, through the arming of Antony, she and the Roman general together in a victory against Caesar become the Venus armata<\/em> (Wind 85-87), fusing love and honor, affect and action, personal and civic fulfillment. Cleopatra is the divinely variable and multivalent \u201cgrave charm\u201d (4.13.25), who, through her vitality in idleness, is more constant to the ideals of the complete life and Roman constancy than Antony ever was.<\/p>\n

Cleopatra, as a tragic hero with unavoidable flaws, also illustrates the idea that time can be better spent in suspended idleness than in activity badly executed. Whereas in her eagerness to participate after long idleness, she erroneously insists that the battle of Actium be fought at sea, her familiar arena, against Caesar\u2019s formidable fleet, Cleopatra, in act 5, through an act of feminine frivolousness, buys idleness to execute her defiance against Octavius in a death act consummately fusing masculine and feminine, Roman heroic ethos and Egyptian mythologies of the life circle.<\/p>\n

Like Cleopatra, who shows the value in non-active waiting, Virgilia, in Coriolanus<\/em>, demonstrates otium honestum<\/em> (besides the Miltonian idea that those who wait patiently also serve): she serves the state through her unflinching dedication to the hearth and the peaceful life, a subtle but solid counterresponse to the hypermasculine militancy of Rome. As Aristotle states, \u201cmen must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better\u2026\u201d (Politics<\/em> VII.14.1333b). Soft-spoken Virgilia is often interpreted in criticism as the cipher character of the silent, submissive wife. I argue, however, that through her insistent femininity and protection of the domestic sphere, she is Shakespeare\u2019s conscientious objector against Rome\u2019s hypermasculine ideology. \u201cNo less than seven times in about forty lines does she refuse to accompany Volumnia and Valeria out of doors\u201d (Miola 172), steadfastly guarding the hearth. She is the voice of human sentience and nurturing in an environment where the norm, even among women with their traditionally readier access to feeling, is to regard cruel violence as a sign of nobility: besides the notorious example of Volumnia relishing the bloody badges of wounds, Valeria admiringly recounts how Coriolanus\u2019s son, \u201ca noble child,\u201d viciously \u201cmammocked\u201d (1.3.61) a butterfly in play. In contrast, Virgilia, in her closed and reticent manner, ardently protects domesticity and the bonds and feelings inhabiting that space. Though Coriolanus calls Virgilia, \u201cMy gracious silence\u201d (2.1.161), it is less to signify wifely subjection than the feminine complement to his martial austerity. In this respect, she is the play\u2019s model of virtuous moderation, passionately defending the hearth while enduring her husband\u2019s martial and civic endeavors pacifically, not passively. In the sheer lack of critical attention given to the conventionally demure Virgilia, overshadowed by the more forceful characters, scholarship has neglected her courageous forbearance in Coriolanus\u2019s absence and in single-handedly resisting hegemonic masculinity.2<\/p>\n

II.<\/p>\n

Besides this gender revision to early modern privileging of martial heroics and civic industry, Shakespeare exposes the association of these ideals with the upper class by upholding the plebeians\u2019 and the mechanicals\u2019 earnest work over aristocratic leisure in Coriolanus<\/em> and Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, respectively. In the Roman tragedy, the plebeians are presented, from the patrician view, as mediocre in courage and intelligence by their very nature. Yet it is the lack of leisure, the \u201ctime to be educated into civil society, time to participate in deliberation\u201d (Barber 141), that makes them ill-suited for civic participation rather than what the patricians believe, a natural incompetence. Indeed, despite their need for further civic training, the plebeians, in their initial discussion of whether to endorse Coriolanus, exhibit the ability to deliberate and argue both sides of the issue. Their potential for civic participation is furthermore evidenced historically in the \u201ccivic politics of the 204 towns and cities throughout England\u201d incorporated by 1610, which \u201cenjoyed a degree of legislative autonomy and civic jurisdiction\u201d (Shrank 408).<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the pre-eminent patrician, Coriolanus, regarding them as \u201cthe mutable rank- scented meinie\u201d (3.1.70), \u201clove[s] them as they weigh\u201d (2.2.69), pushing the virtue-challenged to prove their worth. He stresses in this regard that the state dispensation of corn was not a reward for the plebeians\u2019 cowardly martial effort at Corioles. This situation counterposes two divergent perspectives on civic duties and benefits: social entitlement vs. merit. In Coriolanus\u2019s hard-line view, though patricians gain their enormous economic and political entitlements largely through birth, the plebeians must earn<\/em> their meager allotments, but because of their cowardice, \u201cDid not deserve corn gratis\u201d (3.1.128). His rigorous martial standards exact an effort equal to his from those with less moral luck, i.e., without the mental and physical capacities and socio-economic privileges conducive to the virtue he himself has attained.3 Unlike Antony\u2019s magnanimity towards his men, Coriolanus holds \u201ca lofty bearing \u2026 among humble people [which] is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak\u201d (Aristotle, NE<\/em>, IV.3.1124b22-23).<\/p>\n

It does not dawn on Coriolanus, with his lack of social imagination, that with more food rousing First Citizen complains about the constant state\u2014in war and peace alike\u2014of being eaten though themselves starved: \u201cIf the wars eat us not up, [the patrician rapacious belly] will; and there\u2019s all the love they bear us\u201d (1.1.75). In contrast, the patricians\u2014with fuller bellies, the motivation to protect their estates, and the martial training bestowed upon a warrior class\u2014 would presumably demonstrate better soldiership on the battlefield. In spheres of peace, however, the patricians exhibit nobility only in the social sense\u2014without demonstrating the moral excellence constitutive of the Greek aristoi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As Andrew Gurr, Arthur Riss, and others have argued, Coriolanus instantiates \u201ca decline in the ideological persuasiveness of the belly metaphor\u201d (Riss 71, n. 3), undercutting a \u201cnatural\u201d correspondence \u201cbetween the hierarchical unity of the human body and the feudalistic organization of the ruling political body\u201d (Riss 53). Indeed, Menenius\u2019s telling of the belly parable of act 1, scene 1 to appease the plebeians is a distortion of the Platonic tripartite body politic, by which the ruling class, designating its head, overextends its physiological functions and boundaries and, contrary to its characterizing rational faculty, rapaciously occupies the belly, home of the lower appetites. According to Menenius, the condescending answer of the \u201cgood belly\u201d (1.1.137), representing the \u201cfat and prosperous\u201d senators of Rome, is that through \u201cTheir counsels and their cares, \u2026 Touching the weal o\u2019th\u2019 common, \u2026\/ No public benefit which you receive\/ But it proceeds or comes from them to you,\/ And no way from yourselves\u201d (139-43)\u2014 similar to the ideology of the feudal aristocratic system by which lords collected tithes from their vassals and serfs. By virtue of their famished condition, the plebeians\u2019 view of the \u201ccormorant belly\u2026 the sink o\u2019th\u2019body\u201d (110-11) as \u201cidle and unactive,\/ Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing\/ Like labour with the rest\u201d (88-90) seems more accurate. Contrary to Coriolanus\u2019s condemnation of the plebeians, a more objective view reveals the laziness of the patrician leisure class juxtaposed against a plebeian class, i.e., tradesmen, who, in having to work for their livelihood, still cannot feed themselves because the patricians presumably are selling corn at exorbitant prices.<\/p>\n

While the patrician-warriors fight against foreign enemies to defend Rome in order to protect their estates, in times of peace they show little concern for common good, the welfare of the plebeians. As the First Citizen protests,<\/p>\n

Care for us! True, indeed! They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store- houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us. (1.1.70-76)<\/p>\n

Coriolanus, less than two hundred lines later in sarcastic contempt toward the plebeians, bears out the truth of this statement: \u201cThe Volsces have much corn; take these rats thither\/ To gnaw their garners. Worshipful mutiners,\/ Your valour puts well forth: pray, follow\u201d (1.1.240-42). In a civic state like the republic that Rome is trying to establish, the Haves, in the name of the public good, should ensure that reasonably working citizens do not go hungry. Instead, Coriolanus sardonically invites the plebeians to appease their hunger by taking from the Volsces\u2014by looting their supplies or by treasonously joining their side. Neither way is savory. This baiting by Coriolanus not only reveals his lack of moral decency, but also foreshadows his own subsequent changing of sides. Coriolanus\u2019s repulsion toward the plebeians to distinguish himself from the common herd ironically undermines the very virtue that he so inflexibly tries to uphold.<\/p>\n

The attitude of Theseus and his party towards the mechanicals in Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> further belies the \u201cnatural\u201d superiority of the noble class over the working class. In response to the tradesmen\u2019s \u201clamentable comedy\u201d of Pyramus and Thisbe, which they present in honor of their ruler\u2019s marriage, Theseus\u2019s party lacks the good graces to acknowledge their earnest efforts and instead mock the performance as \u201cthe silliest stuff that [they] ever heard\u201d (5.1.207), poking fun at the inept literalness of all the characters. Despite his ostensible professions of lordly benevolence in his words, \u201cFor never anything can be amiss,\/ When simpleness and duty tender it\u201d (5.1.82-83), Theseus does not follow through with this adage. He makes a half-hearted gesture to defend the mechanicals\u2019 overly literal acting: \u201cThe best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them\u2026. If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men\u201d (5.1.211-12). It is not aesthetic imagination, as Theseus and Hippolyta believe, that could transform the actors into noble men, but rather social<\/em> imagination that could transform the mechanicals into excellent citizens.<\/p>\n

Like Coriolanus, Theseus and his party fail to show \u201cnoble respect\u201d (5.1.91) towards the mechanicals\u2019 gesture of homage. The mechanicals, na\u00efvely thinking that their \u201crealist\u201d performance will frighten the noble ladies, dispel all theatrical representation with their literalness by making metadramatic confessions such as \u201cthe lantern doth the horned moon present\u201d (5.1.231). Here, the mechanicals parodically engage in \u201cemplotment,\u201d the ancient and Renaissance prudential deliberation about means and ends, which the mechanical arts surrounding drama production on the stage (plat<\/em>) promoted (Turner 23). It is this moral and practical prudence, however, that the nobles lack, being too \u201csophisticated\u201d to connect the play\u2019s basic truth\u2014the lament over the stymied course of true love\u2014to their own recent toils of love. The mechanicals do a poor but honest job at entertainment. They artlessly mix earnestness with merrymaking, tragedy with comedy, offering the nobles a different kind of \u201clove-in-idleness\u201d that attempts to build community rather than romance.<\/p>\n

One might object here that concerns about social progress are anachronistic and unwarranted by this scene of wedding festivities, tying knots in comedic union. After all, the nobles\u2019 viewing of the mechanicals\u2019 entertainment presupposes condescension on their part, and, moreover, they are impatiently awaiting bedtime (not unlike Christopher Sly, if I might add), which will joyfully consummate their marriages: as Theseus asks, \u201cIs there no play\/ To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?\/ … Say, what abridgement have you for this evening\u201d (5.1.36-37). This need of a pastime to shorten the wedding evening underscores all the more, however, the plight of the nobility during ordinary days of leisured existence: the struggle against boredom. The framing structures of Boccaccio’s Decamerone<\/em> and Castiglione’s Cortegiano<\/em> both situate \u201ca group of men and women anxious to find some way of passing the time\u201d (Burke 142). The etymology of the word \u201cpastime,\u201d as Peter Burke observes, also testifies to this struggle:<\/p>\n

In French, passetemps<\/em> was a word coined in the fifteenth century and it has been argued that the new word expressed a new assumption, “that time was a substance which might be shaped by human will”. In English, the word “pastime” is first recorded in 1490. At much the same time, at the court of Isabella d’Este, a contemporary described Carnival games as a means “to pass the time” (“per passare il tempo<\/em>“)… Montaigne commented on the French term passetemps that it implied that time was “something annoying and contemptible” (“chose de qualit\u00e9e ennuyeuse et dedaignable<\/em>“). In similar fashion the English novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding observed towards the end of our period, “To the upper Part of Mankind Time is an Enemy, and . . . their chief Labour is to kill it”. (142)<\/p>\n

Certainly, the western tradition reveals a defense of relaxation going back to Aristotle in his defense of leisure, pleasure, and amusement: \u201chappiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace\u201d (NE<\/em>, X.7.177b5, 1176b). In Roman times, Valerius Maximus, as a minority voice, wrote of otium as \u201clegitimate rest or refreshment after exertion\u201d (Vickers 35). During the Renaissance, while music, as a \u201cthing to passe the time withal,\u201d is \u201cassociated in The Courtier<\/em> and other contemporary texts with the making of womanish or effeminate men, along with \u2018other vanities\u2019\u201d (Parker 198), Sir Thomas Elyot\u2019s The Boke named the Governour<\/em> emphasizes that music \u201conly serveth for recreation after tedious or laborious affairs,\u201d\u2013\u2013a view that Thomas Morley\u2019s manual on music also endorses (Parker 196-97).<\/p>\n

These last examples underscore, however, that music and other amusements depend on precedent, \u201cmore serious\u201d studies. Despite the Carnival games played at the court of Isabella d\u2019Este, the marquesa of Mantua (1474-1539), a major cultural and political figure of her time, lived by a stricter ethos, \u201cspend[ing] her leisure hours in her studiolo,<\/em> practicing otium honestum<\/em>\u201d (Vickers 125), surrounded by a series of \u201cgarden of vanity\u201d paintings by Mantegna, based upon her outlines or invenzioni (123). One of them called \u201cMinerva expelling the Vices from the garden of Virtue\u201d well reflects the virtuous life she led as a ruler and patroness of the arts attracting many of the era\u2019s finest artists and writers. Isabella d\u2019Este instantiates the idea that the aristocratic prerogative of leisure comes with a duty to use it with honor, as Aristotle observes:<\/p>\n

the enjoyment of good fortune and the leisure which comes with peace tend to make [men] insolent. Those then who seem to be the best-off and to be in the possession of every good, have special need of justice and temperance \u2026 ; they above all will need philosophy and temperance and justice, and all the more the more leisure they have, living in the midst of abundance. (Politics<\/em> VII.15.1334a4)<\/p>\n

Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>\u2019s \u201cgarden of vanity\u201d reveals delusions concerning love, political power, social hierarchy, and the self. The most honest thing in the play is the mechanicals\u2019 desire and effort to please the nobles with worthy entertainment. Aside from humor, Shakespeare presents the mechanicals\u2019 play within the play as a social commentary on the nobility. Although we can commiserate with the nobles in having to endure the artisans\u2019 lamentable performance, there is something precious about the way the nobles \u201ctake it with humor\u201d\u2014not good-heartedly (as one would a children\u2019s performance) but disparagingly, showing off their sophisticated wits at the expense of the mechanicals. To illustrate:<\/p>\n

Theseus: A very gentle beast, of a good conscience.
\nDemetrius: The very best at a beast, my lord, that e’er I saw.
\nLysander: This lion is a very fox for his valour.
\nTheseus: True; and a goose for his discretion.
\nDemetrius: Not so, my lord; for his valour cannot carry his discretion; and the fox carries the goose. (5.1.222-27)<\/p>\n

The nobles here exhibit rhetorical somersaults around Aesop\u2019s fable about the fox and the lion. In so doing, they themselves illustrate its moral, \u201cFamiliarity breeds contempt,\u201d through their mocking of the tinker Snout as a \u201cgoose.\u201d For all their badinage about his \u201cvalour\u201d and \u201cdiscretion\u201d or lack thereof, they exhibit none themselves in their lack of \u201cready wit,\u201d the ability \u201cto joke in a tasteful way\u201d (Aristotle, NE<\/em>, IV.8.1128a10), an important feature of the virtuous person in social intercourse. Unwittingly, they end by \u201ccarr[ying] the goose.\u201d<\/p>\n

This cavalier attitude of the leisure class ultimately prevents them from gaining moral insight into their own affective experience\u2014flaws of civic leadership and self-knowledge. It is this affective disconnection that the women reproach in the men of Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost,<\/em> resulting in an unprecedented lack of coupling at the end of that early comedy. Like Berowne and his peers of Navarre\u2019s court, Theseus and his nobles must \u201cunlearn their pretensions\u201d (Brown 33) and strive to be \u201cgenerous, … gentle, … humble\u201d (Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost<\/em>, 5.2.617), taking a cue from Holofernes, one of the players in that comedy\u2019s parodic pageant of Nine Worthies. It is precisely in this affective power that the plebeians and the mechanicals and Cleopatra and Virgilia prove sovereign over the likes of Theseus and Coriolanus as the class and gender inferiors \u201csweat [in] labour\/ To bear \u2026 idleness so near the heart\u201d (Antony and Cleopatra<\/em>, 1.3.95-96). Drawing on the rich humanist discourse on idleness and work, Shakespeare offers to his era and ours expansive models of meaningful existence and activity beyond those perpetuating patriarchal power: the \u201cheavenly mingle\u201d (Antony and Cleopatra<\/em>, 1.5.58) of work and play, rich internal life, domestic bonding, and community building.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

1 All citations of Shakespeare refer to The Norton Shakespeare<\/em>. I would like to thank Edmund Taft for his encouragement and the anonymous reader for his\/her valuable comments, the impetus to turning out a much better study on the subject.<\/p>\n

2 Miola\u2019s essay on Roman piety is the most affirmative treatment of Virgilia I have found. Besides Miola, T. McAlindon affirms the effectiveness of Virgilia\u2019s silence in disarming Coriolanus in act 5: \u201cAngrily, [Volumnia] perceives he is not listening, not even looking at her; that it is Virgilia he sees and who moves him…\u201d (516). Virgilia is most often invoked as a foil to Volumnia\u2019s \u201cthirst for blood,\u201d as Katharine Eisaman Maus does in her Norton introduction to the play (2788), where the sustained focus is Volumnia and her aggressive mothering of her son.
\n3 See Cantor, 68: \u201c[T]he distribution of wealth and privilege in Rome favors the growth of spiritedness among the patricians and works against it among the plebeians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Andr\u00e9, Jean-Marie. L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine<\/em>. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. 17-45.<\/p>\n

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation<\/em>. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Trans. W. D. Ross (Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>). Trans. B. Jowett (Politics<\/em>). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.<\/p>\n

Barber, Benjamin. A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong<\/em>. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.<\/p>\n

Bondanella, Julia Conaway. \u201cPetrarch’s Rereading of Otium<\/em> in De vita solitaria<\/em>.\u201d Comparative Literature<\/em> 2008 60.1:14-28.<\/p>\n

Brown, Eric C. \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Anxious Epistemology: Love\u2019s Labor\u2019s Lost<\/em> and Marlowe\u2019s Doctor Faustus<\/em>.\u201d Texas Studies in Literature and Language<\/em> 45.1 (Spring 2003): 20-41.<\/p>\n

Burke, Peter. “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.\u201d Past & Present<\/em> 146 (Feb 1995): 136-50.<\/p>\n

Cantor, Paul. Shakespeare\u2019s Rome: Republic and Empire<\/em>. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976.<\/p>\n

Cicero. De officiis<\/em>. 11 November 2008 < http:\/\/www.stoics.com\/cicero_book.html>.<\/p>\n

Connors, Catherine. \u201cImperial Space and Time: The Literature of Leisure.\u201d Literature in the <\/em>Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective<\/em>. Ed. Oliver Taplin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 492-518.<\/p>\n

Hunt, Maurice. \u201cWork, Sloth, and Warfare in Coriolanus.\u201d Explorations in Renaissance Culture <\/em>20 (1994): 1-18.<\/p>\n

McAlindon, T. \u201cCoriolanus<\/em>: An Essentialist Tragedy.\u201d RES<\/em> New Series 44.176 (1993): 502-20.<\/p>\n

Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Introduction to Coriolanus<\/em>. The Norton Shakespeare<\/em>. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. 2785-92.<\/p>\n

Miola, Robert. Shakespeare\u2019s Rome<\/em>. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.<\/p>\n

Parker, Patricia. \u201cMastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>.\u201d The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies<\/em>. Ed. Dynmpna Callaghan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 193-209.<\/p>\n

Riss, Arthur. \u201cThe Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language.\u201d English Literary History<\/em> 59 (1992): 53-75.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare<\/em>. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.<\/p>\n

Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.<\/p>\n

Turner, Henry S. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial <\/em>Arts 1580\u20131630<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

Vickers, Brian. \u201cThe Ambivalence of Otium<\/em>.\u201d Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies<\/em> 4: 1, 2 (1990 March, June): 1-37; 107-54.<\/p>\n

Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance<\/em>. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unhae Langis, Slippery Rock University The topoi leisure and idleness abound in Shakespearean drama in complex manifestations, replete with class and gender inflections. The privileged term, leisure, modeled after Greek skol\u00e9, refers to the \u201copportunity afforded by freedom from occupations\u201d (OED 2a), as enjoyed by the nobles who, excused from sustenance labor, could ideally devote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":66,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-297","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1098,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297\/revisions\/1098"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}