too much fun: shakespeare's entertainment unconscious

Too Much Fun: Shakespeare's Entertainment Unconscious

Author(s): Donald Hedrick

Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association , Fall 2012, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 17-39

Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43150843

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Too Much Fun: Shakespeare's Entertainment Unconscious

Donald Hedrick

My uses cal title, in the relation including word to and Shakespeare, the since word it "fim," is not since even is Shakespeare willfully recorded ahistori- in never the cal in relation to Shakespeare, since Shakespeare never uses the word and since it is not even recorded in the

Oxford English Dictionary until the late seventeenth century. But its significance and even its own history are pertinent here, for I intend to find in this concept, perhaps perversely attended to, what I term the "entertainment unconscious" of Shakespeare's plays. This terrain registers the tectonic shift produced by the Elizabethan-Jaco- bean commercial theater and London's entertainment industry, con- stituting what might be considered, moreover, as the entertainment revolution of the early modern era.

"Play" is certainly a more academically respectable concept than "fun," especially since it can trace an intellectual heritage that includes such prominent figures as Johan Huizinga and Mikhail Bakhtin. Whether we privilege Huizinga's universalizing move in Homo Ludens to consider play as part or even the foundation of human nature, or the more historicized view by Bakhtin in The World of Rabelais of a localized social process of "carnival" that serves to "uncrown" sovereignty, authority, and hierarchy, play's elasticity as a concept renders it a broad, research-generating paradigm across philosophy, literature, sociology, political theory, and history.

"Fun," by contrast, appears impossibly amorphous, untheo- rizable, and simple. An affect as well as an activity, the concept - if it is a "concept" - is at the same time stigmatized by readily tipping its hat in the direction of commercial culture and leisure. "Fun" is

even more elastic as a reference than as a concept. It has become our

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association | Spring 2012 Vol. 45, No. 1 17



18 I Too Much Fun

perennial value term: an individual's judgment about what is "fun" is a common response from the earliest years of life onward, a chief marker of consumerist choice, adjusting every field and discipline, from journalism and politics to education. For all these reasons, and despite or because of its ubiquity, it would seem the shabbiest of candidate terms available for identifying cultural change and historical social formations, in the way that Raymond Williams famously did with other terms in his Keywords. Instead, it might loosely stand in for entertainment culture or the "culture industry" which was the

Frankfurt School's famous object of attack, for which Adorno and company are too often caricatured as basically anti- fun, although his rhetoric may often make the charge stick: "Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practiced on happiness" (Adorno and Horkheimer 39). Being against fun, if we could identify where this occurs, would perhaps be an even more fundamental prejudice than the "anti-theatrical prejudice" whose history Jonas Barish brilliantly catalogued.

As if itself making similar theoretical talking points by illus- tration, a recent newspaper cartoon strip, cryptically titled "Fun Is Bad" (Griffith), is worthy of analysis for use in a present consider- ation of early modern, Shakespearean fun. Created by the cartoonist of "Zippy the Pinhead," Bill Griffith, the strip calls comic attention both to the word and to its popular usage, in the exemplary postmod- ern fashion of this cartoonist. The visuals to this cartoon, not repro- duced here, hardly help explicate the virtually incoherent exchange of two characters (the "pinhead" Zippy and his wife, Zerbina), the three frames of which follow here:

"FUN IS BAD"

Zippy the Pinhead, by Bill Griffith

Kansas City Star, Preview, Thursday, June 2, 2011, p. 39.

Zerbina: "Zippy, are we a FUN COUPLE? Because I really want us to be a FUN COUPLE ... I want us to have a FUN COUPLE persona."



Donald Hedrick | 19

Zippy: "We ARE a FUN COUPLE, Zerbina! I mean, is there a more FUNNER couple than us??"

Zerbina: "I don't know, Zippy. BOWLING without actually RELEAS- ING th' ball may not be considered a FUN COUPLE THING to do . .

Zippy: "You want me to RELEASE th' ball? . . . Because, I WILL if you want it!"

Zippy: ". . . Oh, Zerbs . . . Let's put aside this silly ARGUMENT . . . What do you say we TEAR UP th' environment in this hot-wired DUNE BUGGY?"

Zerbina: "You're RIGHT! Let's ditch FUN and go for LIFE-THREAT- ENING!!"

While the spoof on the trendiness of "extreme sports" appears to be one identifiable target of this absurd strip, the preoc- cupation with the word "fun" stands out as an independent motif, befitting this cartoonist's Shakespearean obsession with language, language sounds, reference, and orthography (and not accidentally accounting for frequent, irate letters to this newspaper's editor demanding the strip be cancelled for its total, offensive incomprehen- sibility). The absurdity of the "fun" here is a trajectory of extremity that overreaches itself, a trajectory creating creeping doubts (in the sequence's "argument") about what constitutes a "fun" activity, but in effect a movement of fun to a higher order of novelty, and more.

By way of its thematization of the "couple," moreover, the strip posits a heteronormative subsumption of identity into the "couple" selected to "do things" with, as affect and identity are doubled, or as affect becomes one with the identification as a "fun couple," or - even less grounded in reality - as a "fun couple persona."

The asymptotic logic of entertainment value creates an ever- expanding movement toward utter irrationality. The escalation in this case may be limited or constrained by the social bond of the couple ("I will if you want me to"), but soon transgresses in this little narrative to vehicle theft (albeit the lesser crime of theft of



20 ļ Too Much Fun

an entertainment vehicle), individual pleasure over collective good ("tear up the environment"), and risk-taking - the dark side of "fun."

Entertainment logic, moreover, tends to turn all entertainment into contest forms, or, as Theodor Adorno describes it, into "sportification" (89). The implied movement of the "sports" in the strip occurs under the sign of an increasingly dark vision of "fun," all of which is

presented with distinct class, if not redneck, overtones. The strip is really a virtual cultural studies analysis in miniature, as it proceeds by maximizing or doubling one kind of fun on top of another.

Whatever it all means, "Fun Is Bad" portrays, perhaps not entirely unsympathetically, "too much fun." That my essay's title, with its moralizing hint of this same idea that "fun is bad," is an actual historical citation of two hundred years past, is perhaps less surprising than to know its author - William Blake. As it happens, Blake in a letter to an art-loving acquaintance was criticizing the "caricature prints" of his time, contrasting them with the works of artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael. He makes his aesthetic judgment of expertise in terms of a contrasting "fun," by this time a more common word: "Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom" (Blake 702).

Despite Huizinga's humanist take on "play," one can only with difficulty separate the human out from the realm of animal play, to which important parallels are to be drawn in a now flourish- ing field (see Sutton-Smith). We remember the early modern prob- lematization of a strict distinction between animal and human, in

sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne's celebrated question: when he plays with his cat, who knows whether or not she is making him her pastime, rather than the other way around? While parallels abound that occupy biologists, behaviorists, and evolutionists, one nevertheless wants to distinguish the "fun" considered here, in its relation to early commercial culture, from the fun between animals - usually treated as "play," with defining characteristics such as an awareness of its beginning and its end (GofFman 26-27). That is, animals playing have an intuitive sense of differences between nonplay and play. "Fun" in the present context is instead conceived, however, as a limitless becoming, potentially without a stop, an asymmetry of



Donald Hedrick | 21

beginning and end. Its inability to ensure its ending will be seen to structure the plots of some Shakespearean comedies, along the lines of the extreme of "too much fun."

An important near-synonym to "fun," one influential in critical vocabulary, is "festivity," a concept marking influential ap- proaches from C. L. Barber to Mikhail Bakhtin. For Barber, "festivity" virtually defines Shakespeare's "festive comedy," conflating a play such as A Midsummer Night's Dream with the May Day and Midsummer's Eve festivals to which the play alludes. His historical model is the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when slaves rule their masters. In this model, festivity constitutes a temporary and largely individual escape - such as the play's flight from Athens to the for- est - during which time a "release" occurs that returns the social order to its norm and that clarifies identities and relationships, or, in

Barber's formula: "from release to clarification" (6). Considered in its entirety, the process understood this way is fundamentally con- servative, conserving social formations and expectations, such as gender hierarchies that typically end in heterosexual marriage in Shakespeare.

Bakhtin, by contrast, shifts the emphasis away from temporary release to the specific social worlds created or imagined by various historical festivals. The carnivalesque moment rather emphasiz- es the transgressive and critical character of the world turned upside down during this form of festivity, in effect producing a Utopian im-

age in which servants and women, for instance, achieve power and in which sovereignty in turn becomes "uncrowned" (Stallybrass and White 6; see also Bristol). For Bakhtin, carnival thus has a distinctly revolutionary cast and potential, and can thus become the setting or occasion for actual dissidence, revolt, and even revolution.

If I may make a further distinction here, I would propose that "fun" constitutes a similar but crucially different form of affec-

tive pleasure, following neither Barber's nor Bakhtin's models. Its distinction is in its association with what neither Barber nor Bakhtin

fully addresses - namely, entertainment value and what would after the early modern period come to be called, in Frankfurt School critique, the "culture industry." "Fun" achieves its most distinct forma-



22 I Too Much Fun

tion under this sign of capital, whose economic nature it parallels if not replicates. Rather than a temporary release and identity clarifier, "fun's" tendency is to be self-perpetuating and innovating, estab- lishing rather than simply revealing identity. "Fun" is thus capable of inventing the "fun couple," and the corresponding "fun couple" as a partner. While it may certainly have a transgressive character, it need not, only transgressing whatever temporary limits are set to it. Like capital for Marx, its inherent tendency is to infinite expansion and limitlessness. It can both overturn as well as recuperate custom and tradition, evaporating otherwise fixed social relations and insti- tutions into "thin air." Fun's inner logic, as it were, and its ever-pres-

ent tendency, is toward "too much fun" - neither returning social formations to a status quo nor figuring an alternative. It is this over-

reaching character that becomes a central feature or "entertainment unconscious" of Shakespearean comedy, and perhaps even present, less explicitly, within Shakespearean tragedy. While this phenomenon in early modern London preceded the later seventeenth-century word itself (it is never used by Shakespeare), it may be distinguished from either escape or critique, as an almost transcendent or sublime relation, even while originating in economic scam or profit, as it ap- parently does linguistically as a verb in its earliest recorded usage, "to fun someone out of something."

While anachronistic linguistically, it may be that "fun" as a flexible concept best captures the important innovations of the Eliz- abethan and the Shakespearean theater. It derives, I propose, from what is generally now termed the London "entertainment industry" of Shakespeare's time. In this sense, it encompasses but is not limited to Shakespeare or even the early modern theater, but should include "fun" in its broadest sense, and therefore all other adjunct entertainments - blood sports, prostitution, gambling, printed pam- phlets, ale and gambling houses, sports contests and the like - all of which provided the proliferation of choices of entertainment noted by foreign visitors in their comments on London's noteworthy fea- tures to be experienced. These provided what might be thought of as "real entertainments" (Hedrick, "Real Entertainment") more than simply represented ones, and entertainments with which the theater



Donald Hedrick | 23

would invariably be juxtaposed, if not compared. The defining key to "fun" as affect and activity is therefore

a proliferation of choices of entertainment, what was thematized in "Zippy" as a movement from bowling to dune-buggying, the choice ultimately nonrational or indifferent. Choices and distinctions among choices thus constitute a true entertainment revolution, with the consequence that at an individual level, the choice becomes which experience to spend one's discretionary pence on at a time. The impact of this entertainment arrangement is well illustrated in a contemporary representation by Thomas Nashe, who imagines the combination of boredom and variety of choices - implying commercial rivalries - in a picture of young, bored gallants trying to reach a consensus about how to spend an idle afternoon:

. . . saith one, "Let us go to the Steelyard and drink Rhenish wine."

"Nay, if a man knew where a good whorehouse were," saith another, "it were somewhat like."

"Nay," saith the third, "let us go to a dicing house or a bowling alley and there we shall have some sport for our money." (Nashe 64)

Choice of novelties parallels choice of genres within literature and drama, modeled on the central fact of the decision of which

"pastime" in London to attend. We see this aspect of the "entertainment industry unconscious" (Hedrick, " King Lear or Bolt") in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in the amiable domestic scene at the beginning of the play, in the boy Mamilius's question, turning out to be prophetic, to his mother Hermione, whose life will moments later be overturned by her incensed husband's false accusation of her unfaithfulness. Thus, Mamilius responds to her cheerful request to tell her a story by asking, "Merry or sad shall it be?" To her open- ended reply - "As merry as you will" - he preemptively chooses for her, offering her a "sad tale" that's "best for winter" (2. 1 .25-27) - in a pointed forecast of the sadness that immediately follows. But Shakespeare's surprise in that late dramatic work will be to provide



24 I Too Much Fun

both alternatives, two plays for the price of one through The Win- ter 's Tale's genre of tragicomedy (now understood in more critical consensus as the Shakespearean genre of "late romance," with its turnabout happy ending). As in "real" entertainment, Hermione has only the semblance of actual "choice"; the real choice has already been made, not so much by Mamilius as by Shakespeare and the King's Men. Yet the increasing proliferation of choices in the entire London context invites opportunity for drawing proliferating aesthetic distinctions, beyond even the conventional affective binaries of "comedy" versus "tragedy": hence the topical humor, whether he intends it or not, in Polonius's description of the actors' skills in a variety of up-to-date genres and novelty hybrids for the decision- making among choices underlying Shakespeare's entertainment unconscious:

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastorial, tragical-historical, tragical-

comical-historical-pastoral . . . {Hamlet 2.2.379-81)

This logic informs the "entertainment value," understood technically, that works itself out aesthetically in Shakespeare's plays. For a brief explanatory example of the way this works in Shake- speare, I will provide a short summary of my analysis of entertainment logic and value in Shakespeare's Henry V (Hedrick, "Advan- tage"). In this history play, the main story is that of the new king's military victory over the French against enormous odds, a triumph that redeems his former reputation as the profligate prince. This entertainment logic, applicable as well to audience response, underlies the play's narrative of warfare itself, understood to operate in this case on the same principle: that is, the most victory from the least number of invested troops, which Henry employs in order to turn his

military situation of being vastly outnumbered by the enemy French from a disadvantage to an advantage: the theme of his outrageously hyperbolic St. Crispin's Day speech about "we few, we happy few" to the troops, telling them that "the fewer men, the greater share of honour" (4.3.22). The speech's own entertainment unconscious se-



Donald Hedrick | 25

cured for Shakespeare a fame, in quotation, equivalent to Henry's. The Battle of Agincourt, still cited in world military history,

with the English facing overwhelming odds, is won by them with overwhelming numbers - the casualty statistics are reported to the king as being 10,000 French dead to twenty-eight British. The numbers themselves, sounding suspiciously like sheer fantasy, nevertheless reflect the economic and affective logic of "too much fun." This economic allegory, as it were, in turn reflects the theater's economic context, as a developing industry from which, during its prominence in London, enormous profits were to be made, for Shakespeare and other shareholders, although often not for the "hired men" of the acting companiés.

Henry Vs wildly triumphant military victory concludes, however, with a scene of romantic comedy, often regarded as incon- gruous for ending a historical epic, in which Henry, while negotiat- ing the terms of peace with the French monarchy, takes some time out to "woo" the Princess of France to marry him, thus joining their empires more officially than by mere conquest. What transpires in the scene is the entertainment axiom of the "maximization of af-

fect," the production of "love" (if it is, as usually denied by critics, love at all) in the least time with the least means - the least means here including Henry's lack of much French, Princess Katharine's corresponding lack of English, Henry's bluff, unsophisticated de- meanor, and the awareness that their time together is only a brief private intermission during the offstage peace-treaty negotiations. The principle of "maximization of affect," modeled on affective labor, is then realized further in this romantic interlude in which

Katharine of France is ironically the English king's stated "capital demand" from the defeated French. At the same time, Henry also endeavors (or pretends) to carry out a banter of dialogue in English and mangled French to persuade her to "love" him. This so-called wooing scene, as the play's controversial ending, has been received in a variety of ways by critics and by audiences: either as a charming seduction scene, as an uncomfortable and unconvincing aesthetic misjudgment on Shakespeare's part, or as a glorified equivalent of the rape of France by Henry's masculinist conquest.



26 I Too Much Fun

Shakespeare's "entertainment value" predecessor for this kind of comedy is found in the early tragedy of Richard III, in the infamous scene of the villain Richard III persuading Lady Anne, during the funeral procession of her husband, whom Richard has killed, to take him in marriage. His famous concluding boast of suc- cess - "Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman

in this humour won?" ( Richard III 1 .2.2 1 5- 1 6) - not only character-

izes the perverse bravado of Richard but at the same time explicitly gestures at the "advantage" logic of entertainment itself - the entertainment of the audience as well as Richard's entertainment of

himself. Psychologizing the action to "understand" why Lady Anne assents, however much psychological motivation is required from a modern actor's perspective, is from the present perspective beside the point of the scene's intended tour de force of maximized affect. I do not argue that Shakespeare is exactly the "inventor" of entertainment value, though he undoubtedly contributes to the market expansion of its axioms. In fact, Christopher Marlowe is a more ap- propriate candidate, if individual credit is to be given. Marlowe ini- tiates one of its historical dimensions tied to the star system, namely the creation of a stage or theatrical masculinity in the Marlovian su- perhero such as Tamburlaine - an aesthetic innovation that Shake- speare runs with and develops further in his histories and tragedies (Hedrick, "Male Surplus Value"). Shakespeare can indeed be overt or explicit about this theatrical value, as in his first tragedy, Titus An- dronicus, when he implicitly boasts of his accomplishment in maximizing audience outrage by maximizing the outrages done to the Andronicus family, thus motivating their own over-the-top revenge. In the tragic monologue early on in the play when Marcus discovers his niece - who has been raped and mutilated, her arms cut off, and her tongue cut out - he in effect cites the aesthetic "improvement" or at least novelty over the classical Ovidian analogue tale of the rape of Philomel, who only had her tongue cut out in Ovid. The new criminal, according to Marcus alluding to Ovid, is a " a craftier Tereus . . ." - smarter in eliminating Lavinia's means of testifying against her violators, but also "craftier" in producing the artifice of an affect, the greater offense both to the onstage Andronicus family



Donald Hedrick | 27

and to the offstage empathetic audience. In a sense, the outrages of the play, which build up to the climactic final revenge scene of can- nibalism and murder, constitute a perverse kind of comedy of "too much fun." Hence the lingering critical question of whether the entire play is satiric, or a comparable tendency in performance to camp up the concluding violence - as in Julie Taymor's film version, in which mugging Anthony Hopkins as mad revenger Titus replays a classical version of his famed, psychotic cannibal character from The Silence of the Lambs, Shakespeare offering him an opportunity for continuing "fun" with the part.

Shakespeare thus folds in the revenge tradition of the revenger going mad through overreaching, as a kind of comic pleasure, not only for the audience but even for the revenger himself The "mad" revenger clearly has "too much fun" by the end of his revenge play, and he is often clearly enjoying this kind of "fun." Shakespeare develops this further in the characters of Hamlet (his "antic disposition" and his taunting of Claudius and almost every- one else) and of the "too much fun" of villain Iago, escalating into murder from his smug private reflection that "Pleasure and action make the hours seem short" ( Othello 2.3.352; see Hedrick, "Dis- tracting Othello," for that tragedy's particular entertainment unconscious in stage magic).

In Shakespeare's earliest comedy, The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare achieves the maximization of the plot's fun by the simple means of doubling the twins of his source tale, to create an expo- nentially confusing screwball comedy of mix-ups and misidentifica- tions. But Shakespeare's comic version of this pleasurable excess, as a narrative principle rather than a plot complication, is best ex- emplified in the early comedy Love s Labour 's Lost, in its own trajectory of entertainment-value affect. In a remarkable parallel to the limitless escalation of "fun" in the play, Shakespeare includes some of the most sustained and extensive linguistic fun, with a count of over two hundred puns, what Samuel Johnson thought was Shake- speare's "fatal Cleopatra" for which he was willing to "sacrifice the world." The excessive play of language in Love s Labour 's Lost has garnered extensive critical attention itself, from the semiotician's



28 I Too Much Fun

view of Shakespearean comedies' "language-games" (Elam), to a full monograph on the "feast of languages" in the play (Carroll), to a teasing out of wide linguistic references (Parker). What is striking for the present purposes, however, is that the excess of language that

saturates the play takes place in the manner of the limitlessness of "fun," thus embodying the same trajectory of overreaching that we see in entertainment value.

Fun logic appears in linguistic miniature throughout the play. The play's comical pedant and curate, Holofernes and Nathan- iel, trade Latin words and elaborate rhetorical figures in displays of affected knowledge and wordplay, which they push to the point of ridiculousness, even when they themselves are criticizing the af- fectedness of the self-important Spaniard Armado: as Holofernes describes him, "He is too picked, too spruce, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it" (5.1.12-13). What was probably one of the few moments of educational fun for young male scholars in the agon of early modern Latin language learning (Ong) receives its due from Shakespeare, who has the rustic Costard compare the boy-page Moth to the pedagogically famous longest Latin word: "I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the

head as honorificabilitudinitatibus " (5. 1 .37-39). The play is a study in both varieties of excess as well as kinds of fun, as the Spaniard Armado, noted for his "fire new words," linguistically stumbles into accidental obscenity when attempting to negotiate English by force, trying bombast to brag of his familiarity with the King of Navarre, who according to Armado would even play with Armado 's mus- tache, as he describes in sublimely accidental obscenity: "it would please his grace . . . sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder and with his royal finger thus to dally with my excrement" [intending its literal Latin meaning of "outgrowth"] (5.1.87-88).

While misidentification in The Comedy of Errors motivates the entire comedy, with the sorting out happening as the final plot resolution, in Love 's Labour s Losi it becomes ephemeral play, the temporary fun which the four male lovers think up in disguising themselves as Muscovites for a masquing entertainment, as the trivi- ality of their scheme becomes more and more obvious, following



Donald Hedrick ļ 29

their quick failure to stick to the "little academe's" abstinence pact they sign together at the play's opening. When the masked four ladies of France play the junior-high-ish prank of switching the favors given to them by the men, so as to tease the men and deflate their masque "assault," the confusion is only temporary, though allego- rized with the apt, self-reflective comment by the young witty Bi- ron: "The ladies did change favours, and then we, / Following but the signs, wooed but the sign of she" (5.2.468-69).

The ephemeral nature of their first "fun" in the play is re- played in a second courtly entertainment, the amateur pageant of the classical "Nine Worthies" heroes presented by the rustics and pedants of the play to the now properly paired couples as audience. Shakespeare escalates the scene's "iun" in the direction of sublime limitlessness (and the "so bad it's good" fun he will replay in writing the amateur play "Pyramus and Thisbe" into A Midsummer Night s Dream). However, the pageant, providing a different fun for the heckling audience, breaks down into a "reality entertainment" when the rustic bumpkin Costard confronts and challenges the performing Spaniard Armado onstage for getting Costard's girlfriend Jacquen- etta pregnant. As the courtly but ridiculously unconvincing "pageant" illusion devolves (or evolves?) into real-life drama onstage, to the great continuing amusement of the mocking nobles, Shake- speare ups the stakes of the reigning already over-the-top chaos, by reaching a new, contrary sublime, with the sudden, unexpected entrance of the French messenger Mercade. His sober interruption an- nounces, in brief dialogue with the Princess, the death of her father, the King of France. Shakespeare italicizes the almost slow-motion moment in which both linguistic and performative "fun," having ac- celerated to top speed, suddenly stop, in a collision of exuberant language and high spirits. The collision is registered in the amaz- ingly portrayed, convincingly numbing and painful short exchange between the Princess and the newly arrived messenger:

MERCADE God save you, Madam.

PRINCESS Welcome, Mercade,



30 I Too Much Fun

But that thou interrupt'st our merriment.

MERCADE I am sorry, madam, for the news I bring

Is heavy in my tongue. The King your father -

PRINCESS Dead, for my life.

MERCADE Even so. My tale is told.

But the interruption is then itself interrupted by the chief sa-

tiric wit of the young noble Biron, who first takes charge in dismiss-

ing now indecorous amateurs' pageant and its own interruption:

BIRON Worthies, away. The scene begins to cloud. (5.2.699-704)

What had just been transformed into "real" entertainment, that is, the breaking through of the pageant with the love-rivalry fight, becomes even more "real" with the outsider's entrance and announcement, in escalations of what London promoted as its own beginnings of our contemporary "reality show" tradition (Hedrick, "Real Entertainment"). Superfun tops fun, as superreality then tops reality.

In calling the tragic news part of the entertainment's "scene," however, Biron nevertheless intrudes a piece of his indefatigable wit, his problematic temperament in the play, as it happens, for his lover Rosaline, who will end up assigning him a year of lack of fun as a test of his love's sustainability: to win her he must "jest" a year in a hospital among the sick and dying. At this moment, however, the King will follow up on Biron's hint of an opening in the situation, in the spirit of sustaining "more fun." He actually makes the astonishingly insensitive argument that the news of the Princess's father's death should not interrupt the men's courtship of the ladies, since "love's argument was first on foot, / Let not the cloud of sorrow

jostle it / From what it purposed" (5.2.729-31). Trying to convince the ladies not to return to France, he thus views the situation in the



Donald Hedrick | 31

terms of entertainment "sportification" - a masculinist competition of wooing versus mourning, or a contest of comic spirit versus tragic. The Princess's eloquently dumbfounded reply gestures toward the extremity of her sadness , an affect itself newly maximized, as she responses tersely to his failed persuasion: "I understand you not. My griefs are double" (5.2.734). We are thrust into another sublime moment of too much fun.

Since the play's plot structure, until now forgotten by Shake-

speare's audience, depended upon the political purpose of the Prin- cess's visit to regain a rightful tribute owed to her father, "fun" has been set on a collision course with the ultimate reality of death and debt, as the Princess reminds us of her political and economic purpose for the visit that turned into so much mere fun. The wild escalation of fun, from the silly Muscovite masque to the ridiculous Worthies pageant and subsequent brawl, fully embraces the entertainment logic of "too much fun," as if there were nothing else to stop its limitlessness but its own self-consuming character, or its inevitable collision course with unfun.

With the Princess resisting the lame attempt by Biron and the men to keep the wooing going to some consummation such as marriage, Shakespeare brilliantly ends the play by acknowledging its experimental novelty that may be disorienting to the spectators, as its unconventionality is explicitly observed by Biron himself:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy Might well have made our sport a comedy. (5.2.851-53)

While an earlier critical tradition of theater history would have noted such lines as this as "metadrama" (Calderwood), I believe that a much richer account, through "fun" analysis, will see in this meta- theatrical joke some of the very structure of entertainment value, its

maximization of affect, its form as what Biron himself calls "sport," and its trajectory of limitlessness that destroys the very conventional boundaries it sets for itself. Indeed, Biron 's observation looks to

novelty beyond novelty, new forms of affect, new kinds of comedy and even tragedy (Hedrick, "Distracting Othello") under the new



32 I Too Much Fun

regime of entertainment value. Turning to his mature romantic comedy Twelfth Night, we

see Shakespeare further developing and complicating the logic of entertainment value forming an "unconscious" of the play. Here, it will be rendered in the structural arrangement of the highlighted "pranks" of the play successively carried out on the spoilsport Mal- volio, steward to the house of the mourning, then lusting, Countess Olivia. Shakespeare explicitly employs a court fool with the sig- nificant name of "Feste" for this logic, although Feste, as I believe, conforms more to the logic of "too much fun" than to his namesake logic of "festivity" or revels, although "revels" itself suggests the satiety of feasting (see Hollander). Entertainment here is intrigu- ingly built on the ever-escalating logic of revenge psychology from Shakespeare's initial foray into the genre in his earliest tragedy, Ti- tus Andronicus.

While I would contend that this psychology has links to the limitlessness of capitalism experienced or intuited at its earliest stages, it is certainly possible to bracket this economic context in understanding the play, as critical response has already noted the play's trajectory toward excessive play or festivity, echoed in its own festive title of Twelfth Night. Thus, an ingenious metatheatri- cality of the play is its production of boredom with its fun, a weari- ness that may well spill over into the audience reaction, as the audience grows not merely sympathetic with the gulled killjoy Malvolio but actually begins to identify with him when it tires of the play's pranks and fun (see Booth). In the present terms, however, the play conforms to the logic of ever-escalating limitlessness rather than to temporary release or to simple "payback" of the gulled Malvolio, as his pranksters defend themselves for doing.

The often noted rivalry of Feste and Malvolio that erupts into the practical jokes played on Malvolio is already built into their different economic identities or subject positions: Malvolio as steward attached to Lady Olivia's house, in charge of the limits on expenses; Feste, the unattached entertainer in part representing the old norm of entertainment - paying as a "reward" after a suc- cessful performance, like the "masterless men" and vagrants that



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Elizabeth criminalized in 1572 and at other times at the beginning of the purpose-built theaters. The pranks of the play are instigated at the "caterwauling" scene in which the drunken revelers Sir Toby, Aguecheek, and Feste create the ruckus that wakes up Malvolio, who proceeds to put the partying down so offensively that it motivates their comic revenges of humiliation. In that scene we see one kind of escalation of "too much fun," that is, the party that gets out of hand and brings in the authorities to squelch it. What especially signals the "too much" is that Malvolio's entrance not only does not stop the revelry, but actually fuels it further out of the bounds of what Malvolio calls decency ("Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?" 2.3.82-83), as the partiers sing back to him his very attempts at silencing their fun.

What is not particularly marked in the play as the start of the humiliation of Malvolio happens somewhat earlier, in Malvo- lio's specific put-down of Feste and his "nonproductive" occupation of laughter and humor production: "Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged," thus diminishing Feste profession- ally by noting his previous defeat in wit by an "ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone" (1.5.72-73). As "ungenerous" and "sick of self-love" as he is in Lady Olivia's accurate critique of him, Malvolio puts his finger just as correctly on the specific nature of clowning, intertextually echoing the critical observation of Rosaline to Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost, that "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it" (5.2.838-40). Rosaline's more generous comic theory is thus transformable to the ill-spirited theory of Malvolio's put-down of Feste.

Feste's clowning, and its incessantly bittersweet link to personal inadequacy in his final quasi-confessional song about not thriving when he came to "man's estate," is embodied in Shake- speare's care and specificity in representing the economic details of Feste's foolery or artisanal fun throughout the play, in the offhand moments of his professional jesting. In one of them, he offers a cut- ting remark to the deliriously lovesick count Orsino, who has just offered to reward him for the song he sang; Feste turns back this



34 I Too Much Fun

"generosity" on the donor in his own act of ungenerousness, decid- ing instead that a pointed insult of Orsino was more in order:

ORSINO There's for thy pains.

FESTE No pains, sir. I take pleasure in singing, sir.

ORSINO I'll pay thy pleasure then.

FESTE Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another. (2.4.66-70)

Feste follows with a somewhat cryptic prayer, or rather a joke- prayer, for Orsino, namely that the "melancholy god protect thee . . .

for thy mind is a very opal" (73-74) - citing the duke's romantic instability (the equivalent of opalescence in a gem) that ironically is the reason for profit to Feste 's own occupation of momentary jests and novelty, and the very logic of excess fun.

Elsewhere we see fun's logic in Feste 's begging for money for his jesting, in an overly extended exchange of some thirty-plus lines, in which he first wins "gold" from Orsino for a logic-chop- ping but moralistic argument about friends being less honest in what they tell you about yourself than enemies are; then a second play on words about "double-dealing" to grudgingly win a second tip. Like the persistence of the young men in their love conquest in Love 's Labour 's, Feste goes one step too far for a third tip at the same time,

nonsensically comparing the tips he received to various "thirds," including the three rings of the "Bells of Saint Bennet" (5.1.7-39). The moment is a miniaturization of the overreaching practical jokes

in the play, in which we see the economics and the psychology of too much fun, abruptly cut off in its limitless drive for gain. Yet each escalation of income for Feste requires his own opalescent persona, continually forming variety and novelty, like the novelties that

would be provided by the purpose-built Elizabethan theaters under constant pressure to provide a new entertainment to capture discretionary pence from new auditors every few weeks.



Donald Hedrick I 35

But the play's structural replication of "too much fun" occurs in the second of the two pranks played upon Malvolio, after the initial silliness of seeing him cross-gartered and in yellow stockings in the mistaken attempt to please Lady Olivia after falling for Ma- ria's fake love missive. It is the second jest that results in more inter-

pretive sympathy from some critics and audiences: the dark room in which Malvolio, in a brutal contemporary custom for the insane, is imprisoned for his "madness." While the play's more merry pranksters, Maria and Sir Toby Belch, are given a brief moment to pretend their concern that Malvolio has descended into actual madness, it is Feste alone who carries the prank the furthest, coming by himself to the imprisoned and desperate steward for the next stage of practical joking. Arriving on the scene of Malvolio's confinement and disguising himself as "Sir Topas" the curate, he ostensibly provides religious instruction (though nonsensical) and rescue, but actually revels in and enhances Malvolio's desperate humiliation, presum- ably in gleeful anticipation of eventually revealing to Malvolio his having been gulled in such humiliating ways. That we are in the logic of "extra fun," or rather fun's intrinsic trajectory, is brought out clearly in one puzzling feature of Feste 's wearing a beard and disguise for the curate's role, even though Malvolio in the "dark room" is unable to see him at all, can only hear his voice. The con- summate actor-comedian taking on the role of the disguise, Feste even more represents an escalation of fun into the absurd sublime - as in the "Zippy" cartoon - by wearing a disguise to no purpose. Shakespeare even has puzzled Maria point out the irrationality: "Thou mightst have done this without thy beard and gown, he sees thee not" (4.2.57-58). At the same time, through Maria's comment Shakespeare draws the difference between the two modes of play of Maria and of Feste: Maria's is already a brutal gulling, to trick him into thinking he is loved; Feste's, posing as a soul's savior, seems to aim rather for the soul's destruction, transporting the psychology of revenge from tragedy into the entertainment logic of comedy. It is more "fun," for him, and ever expands.

"Too much fun" colors the conclusion of Malvolio's hu-

miliation, when he is informed, as the audience has anticipated he



36 ļ Too Much Fun

would be, of the real origin of the letter, and thus that his fantasy of Countess Olivia's loving him is exposed as merely his fantasy, played upon by the pranksters. Despite this apparent closure, however, we are given the threat of the fun becoming never-ending, as happened in Love 's Labour s, when Feste, gloating in his victory over the play's killjoy, proceeds to read the desperate letter to Olivia that Malvolio wrote from the prison, demanding to know why she has treated him so badly after leading him on in love, as he thought. It is not enough to read it, however, as Feste starts to parody Mal- volio's own voice in his recital, or as he explains his mocking to Olivia, "you must allow vox" (5.1.287), reading the madman madly. Significantly for the present argument, as Feste begins to read the words, his over-the-top, sarcastic mimicry is interrupted by Oliv- ia, who proceeds to turn the letter over to be read by the more in- nocuous Fabian, the character least subject to affect maximization of the play's merry pranksters, and a character of distinctly limited or moderated fun: Fabian was present at Malvolio's letter-baiting, though not at the night "caterwauling" of Toby and the others, that began the war with Malvolio. Olivia effectively puts a damper on, if not an ending to, Feste's trajectory of infinite fun. The over-the-top revenge logic from Shakespearean tragedy, which replicated entertainment logic, is specifically mapped onto the narrative of gulling Malvolio, as Feste describes how "the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," followed by Malvolio's potent (ominous? comical?) reply, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" (5.1.365). The "too much fun" in tragic terms is the revenger's overreach, the often

noted melding of pretended madness with actual madness, carried out in a culmination of excess, and transferred from Feste to Malvo- lio.

One does not necessarily need a "presentisi" position (see Hawkes) to see in these Shakespearean examples the representation and diagnosis of "fun" that was compressed into a single "Zippy" cartoon in our historical conjuncture. The doubling of fun, affect maximization, the trivial elevated to sublime absurdity, the overreaching and limitlessness of its expansion, the privileging of "choice" of fun, the relation to identity and identity formation, the



Donald Hedrick | 37

tendency to contest and sport, and, finally, the darker implications of its extreme trajectory toward death or destruction, are all evident in the original comic example of this essay, as well as in the early modern examples of Love 's Labour s Lost and in Twelfth Night, and perhaps even elsewhere throughout Shakespeare's comic canon. It would almost seem enough to warrant a future specialization of "fun studies."

"Too much fun" resonates in Shakespeare as a form of play historically inhering in the entertainment- value logic that was devel-

oping in the infant "culture industry," with distinct parallels to the logic of capital in its capacity for limitless expansion. The phenomenon looks forward toward, if not actually prophesying, the devel- opment of entertainment into a contemporary, global phenomenon with a universal, hegemonic power attaching to virtually every social formation, practice, institution, and identity - a power perhaps replacing, or at least sometimes occluding, ideology at every turn.

Kansas State University

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too much fun: shakespeare's entertainment unconscious

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