Literature Review Response English 220 Winter 2013

Partial Intro & Thesis Statement All too often, readers and viewers of some of Shakespeare’s plays think that swapping sexual identities should engender comedy in the way that Milton Berle putting on a dress or Robin William’s playing a Mrs Doubtfire role is comic. Robert Kimbrough writing in Shakespeare Quarterly says that “Androgyny is, then, a psychic striving for an ideal state of personal wholeness..., a time when personhood experienced innate wholeness” (20). This is not what many think of when they view or read of Shakespeare’s characters swapping sexual identities. Instead, they are conditioned to look at the swapping of identified sex roles in Shakespeare’s works, Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice among them, as comic in and of themselves. But such a seeing is a mis-seeing. Rather, what Shakespeare does is create a space in which women show themselves the equal and often the better of men, achieving Kimbrough’s state of social androgyny.

Topic Statement One way Nerissa and Portia show themselves to be socially androgynous, striving to be whole, is when they decide to take on the role of men in order to do what their husbands cannot do, save Antonio.

Importance of Topic Added While some contemporary viewers of the play might see something comic in the two women deciding to undertake this seeming sex-change in the third act, it is not comic that they were back then, or could be now, boys playing girls playing boys. Rather, it is the need of two women to abandon their expected roles and to venture into dangerous territory that indicates a repressed social state for women, one in which they cannot fully participate according to their abilities if they remain socially feminine. This can be seen in the letter Nerissa provides the Duke before Portia enters as Balthasar.

Primary Example with Citation The letter states that Portia, as Balthasar, “is furnished with my opinion / which, bettered with his own learning—the greatness / whereof I cannot enough commend—comes with him at my / importunity to fill up your grace’s respect in my stead” (MOV ).

Secondary Example with Citation It is in this letter that readers and viewers of The Merchant of Venice will see that Portia achieves social androgyny, where, as Kimbrough writes, "androgyny is the capacity of a single person of either sex to embody the full range of human character traits, despite cultural attempts to render some exclusively feminine and some exclusively masculine” (19).

Warrant Rather than any comic effect, though that may come in time as the play unfolds, what the viewer or reader can see here is that Portia, and Nerissa with her, that in order to help the men they love, must behave as do those men, against the strictures of society at large. For this to happen, they must enter a state of social androgyny, one where they must wear male clothes in order to achieve social wholeness that would otherwise be impossible without cross dressing or transvestitism.