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ABSTRACT
‘Uneasy comedy’ can be a surprising source of moral insight. Comedies like John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well provoke uneasy laughter, laughter mixed with anxiety and moral concern – concern especially at how characters manipulate and deceive others to achieve certain outcomes. But the characters claim this deception is justified. They argue that their situation calls for a particular moral framework – one based on the achievement of desirable ends, rather than one based on autonomy and consent – and that their actions count as moral within that framework. The issue is that their arguments partially but don’t completely succeed. A key moral piece seems to be missing – but what is it? Is the problem with the characters’ actions or with the framework? To answer that question, we must determine how one would act morally within that framework and when it would be the right one to use. We must ask, essentially, how the story would have to change before we could laugh more freely. Uneasy comedies bring moral clarity through their suggestions about the different moral frameworks called for by different life contexts and what it takes to act worthily within those frameworks.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the readers’ reports on the original draft of this article for directing my attention to new critical sources and new modes of approach to the subject. I also thank Patrick Gray for his feedback on this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Henri Bergson (Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic) and Sigmund Freud (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) emphasise comedy’s unconcern with or resistance to moral norms. For readings of comedy as subverting or suspending moral codes, see Barton, ‘London Comedy’; Bowers, Radical Comedy; and Bristol, Carnival and Theater. The norms that comedy is said to subvert are often political or sexual. On politics, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, and Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics. On sexuality, see Traub, Desire and Anxiety, and Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women.
2 Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, Prologue, 1. All citations are from the edition edited by Britland.
3 Julian, ‘Our hurtless mirth’, 185–86.
4 For a detailed account of the play’s many shifts in mood and tone, see Cordner, ‘The Dutch Courtesan’.
5 Feminist criticism in particular reveals how the experience of a play as a comedy – as something happy, pleasing, desirable, etc. – is undermined if it seems to support unethical or otherwise objectionable views. Schwarz’s essay ‘Comedies End in Marriage’ finds that the notion of comedies’ ‘ethical failure’ ironizes the notion of a truly ‘happy ending’ (274–75). For similar readings in relation to sexist humour, sexual polarity, and female subjection in comedy, see Belsey, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference’; McLuskie, ‘The Patriarchal Bard’; and Jean Howard, ‘Feminist Criticism’.
6 On the play’s critical reception, see introductory materials in the editions of All’s Well That Ends Well edited by Gossett and Wilcox; by Fraser; and by Snyder.
7 2.3.290. All citations are from the edition edited by Gossett and Wilcox.
8 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 97.
9 For a recent discussion of Shakespeare’s larger canon and questions of consent, see Bailey, Shakespeare on Consent. For a recent feminist discussion of consent in a sexual context, see Popova, Sexual Consent.
10 See, for example, Schwarz, ‘Comedies End in Marriage’, and Bates, ‘Love and Courtship’.
11 Korsgaard, ‘The Right to Lie’, 330. Because Kantian philosophy and ethics, with their emphasis on human rationality and autonomy, share so much with political and ethical theories that emphasise consent, I have drawn extensively on Korsgaard’s lucid and modernising explication of Kant to develop this paper’s notion of autonomy-based ethics; see also Christman, ‘Autonomy’. Christman writes, ‘Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally understood to refer to the capacity to be one’s own person, to live one’s life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one’s own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces’; autonomy is ‘a central value in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy’ and in political philosophy, ‘it is the Kantian brand of liberalism that places autonomy of persons at center stage’: Christman, ‘Autonomy’, Introduction, section 3.5.
12 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 97. Lupton’s chapter ‘All’s Well That Ends Well and the Futures of Consent’ reviews seminal works on consent, including Hanna Pitkin, ‘Obligation and Consent’ (1965–1966), David Archard, Sexual Consent (1998), and Peter Westen, The Logic of Consent (2004). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971, rev. 1999), is a contemporary Kantian approach to justice based on notions of autonomy and the social contract. For an overview of the relationship between autonomy and modern political liberalism, see Christman, ‘Autonomy’.
13 See Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 119–21, and Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 69 ff.
14 See Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 60: Measure for Measure ‘works concertedly to violate the very principle of consent in the confessional and in marriage, two areas where the voluntary movements of the heart were historically regarded as completely central’.
15 Shakespeare, Measure For Measure, 5.1.535–37.
16 McCandless, ‘Helen’s Bed-Trick’, 450.
17 See, for example, Jacobs, ‘Measure for Measure’.
18 Julian, ‘Our Hurtless Mirth’, 194.
19 Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves, Chapter 23.
20 Meeker, ‘Past Perfect’, 48.
21 Meeker, ‘The Comedy of Survival’, 17.
22 See Shannon, The Accommodated Animal, ‘Creatures and Cosmopolitans’.
23 Ramachandran and Sanchez, ‘Spenser and “the Human”’, viii; cf. Harvey and Zimmerman, ‘Introduction’. Key works in early modern animal studies include Fudge, Brutal Reasoning; Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals; and Fudge, Perceiving Animals. For a review of recent literature, see Raber, ‘Shakespeare and Animal Studies’.
24 See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, ‘Becoming Human’.
25 Wilson, The Rule of Reason, ‘The vse and commodite, which we hau[] by these fiue commune wordes called otherwise Predicables’; ‘Of the whole and the partes’; ‘Of the [f]iue Predicables, otherwise called the fiue common wordes, which are spoken of other’. Compare to Aristotle, De Anima II.1.
26 Dekker, The Honest Whore, pages 184, 127.
27 Korsgaard, ‘Kantian Ethics’, 631, discusses how and why Kant proposes rationality as a criterion for persons.
28 Korsgaard, ‘The Right to Lie’, 334, 333.
29 Cicero, Three Bokes of Duties, Book 1, Fol. 5–6.
30 Ibid, Grimaulde’s note.
31 When Kosgaard notes that ‘[M]any of the things that I take to be good for me are not good for me merely insofar as I am an autonomous rational being. Food, sex, comfort, freedom from pain and fear, are all things that are good for me insofar as I am an animate and sentient being’, her list is composed of ‘basic goods’: Korsgaard, ‘Kantian Ethics’, 643.
32 Cited in Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 78.
33 See Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral?, ‘Moral Agents, Patients, and Subjects’.
34 Cited in Shannon, The Accommodated Animal, 3.
35 See Korsgaard, ‘Interacting with Animals’, and Sandøe and Palmer, ‘For Their Own Good’.
36 Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 58.
37 A philosophical article might, for example, continue tracing out the relationship between autonomy-based ethics and Kantian philosophy, and the relationship between end-based ethics, classical utilitarianism, and the ethics of care, as developed by Milton Mayeroff, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Annette Baier, Virginia Held, Eva Feder Kittay, Sara Ruddick, Joan Tronto, and others (see Sander-Staudt, ‘Care Ethics’).
38 Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 65. Thomas Aquinas also uses the term ‘reason’ to describe the function that naturally apprehends basic goods: ‘[A]ll the things man has a natural inclination toward are such that reason naturally apprehends them as goods and thus as things that ought to be pursued by action … First, man has an inclination toward the good with respect to the nature he shares in common with all substances,’ which is ‘is everything through which man’s life is conserved’: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II.94.2, emphasis mine.
39 See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 11.
40 See Tilmouth, Passion's Triumph over Reason; Paster, Humoring the Body; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves.
41 Paster, ‘The Tragic Subject’, 154.
42 Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 35.
43 Korsgaard, ‘The Right to Lie’, 335.
44 Ibid., 334.
45 Schleiner, ‘Justifying the Unjustifiable’, 339. I thank Julia Lupton for calling this article to my attention.
46 Ibid., 340, 342.
47 See also Lior, ‘Unwholesome Reversions’.
48 Julian, ‘Our Hurtless Mirth’, 197.
49 Ibid., 201, 200.
50 For an account of why marriage with Helen might count as a good end for Bertram, see Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Snyder, ‘Introduction’, 36ff.
51 Julian, ‘Our Hurtless Mirth’, 201.
52 Schleiner, ‘Justifying the Unjustifiable’, 338.
53 Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.6.73–77.
54 Mulaney, John Mulaney: Baby J.
55 Jay, ‘Why 30’.
56 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 127.
57 Thomas and Moore, ‘Medical-legal Issues’, 559–60.
58 Driving-under-the-influence laws, for example, depend on the notion of implied consent (see Hiemstra, ‘Keeping DUI Implied’).
59 Stimpson, ‘Foreword’, in Held, Feminist Morality, viii.
60 Held, The Ethics of Care, 17.
61 See MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, for a developed account of this view of human beings.
62 Archard, Children, 78, cited in Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 101.
63 Bright, ‘The One’.