PARTISAN REVIEW
533
Adonises are tormented by witches - who usually are bought off or
erased by a variety of duplicitous techniques. (Viola is played by–
wow! - a boy.) At the end of
Love's Labor's Lost,
to take an example,
the King of France's sudden death forces a postponement of the heroes'
marriages.
Fot
Fiedler this is a projection of Shakespeare's sexual in–
hibitions, a last-ditch staving off of the witches. Shakespeare "cannot
compel himself" to end the play in marriage. This ignores the whole
pattern of the play, which begins, as Shakespeare so often does in this
period, with a band of young men refusing fuli sexuality in favor of
camaraderie. The play's action (and its laughter) forces them - again
the pattern is typical - out of their narcissistic withdrawal and toward
adult love. The ultimate step in the process requires an acceptance of
the universe of death, and so the King dies, and the lovers must accept
a probationary year - separate probations by the way; the old gang
must be broken up. The highly mannered hunting-in-a-pack of adoles–
cence and the highly mannered verbal style that accompanies it is to
be replaced by a more demanding commitment and plainer speech. "To
raise harsh laughter in the throat of death" will be a new task for
Berowne - whose instincts are good but who has difficulty speaking
plainly - but it is a respectable one for mature poetry. The cry, "Come
back to academe, Berowne honey," has been heard early on, but the
play has quickly moved beyond it. The point, then, is
not
that Fiedler's
sexual and mythical concerns are out of place in the discussion of
Shakespeare ; in no writer are the sexual and the social more profoundly
combined. But I think that by looking for sexual evasion rather than
sexual comprehension Fiedler has missed an opportunity. His pages on
the romances (the only place, significantly enough, where he seems
willing to grant Shakespeare a balanced and comprehensive view of
sex) remind us of how exciting a critic he can be.
Michael Goldman
THE HARROWING OF MOSCOW
DIABOLIAD AND OTHER STORIES. By Mikhail Bulgakov. Ed. Ellandaa
Proffer and Carl R. Proffer. Trans. Carl R. Proffer. Indiana University
Press. Paper. $2.95.
THE EARLY PLAYS OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV. By Mikhail Bulgakov. Ed.
Ellendee Proffer. Trans. Carl R. Proffer end Ellendea Proffer. Indiana
University Press. Paper. $3.95.
Probably the most remarkable thing about the career of the
Soviet dramatist Mikhai l Bulgakov
(1891 - 1940)
is that he had one at
