Chapter 4 - Shakespeare and the Virtue in Complaining

Summary

Complaining or Virtue

Patience unmoved! …

They can be meek that have no other cause.

A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,

We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;

But were we burdened with like weight of pain,

As much or more we should ourselves complain.

In Act 2 of The Comedy of Errors, irritated by her husband's mysterious failure to return home at the expected hour, Adriana complains. ‘Why should their liberty be more than ours?’ she asks her sister Luciana, ‘Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill’ (2.1.10, 12). Luciana first offers a rationale for this disparity (men's ‘business … lies out o’door’; husbands have authority over their wives), then scolds Adriana for complaining about its consequences (2.1.11). To complain of a husband's unexplained absence, as if he were not free to go where he wishes when he wants, is to be an insufficiently submissive (‘bridle[d]’) wife: Antipholus is ‘master of his liberty’ and your lord, she reminds Adriana, and you must ‘let your will attend’ meekly and patiently on his, without griping (2.1.13, 7, 25). This response, with its echoing of the common-sense logic of patriarchal ideology, provokes Adriana's defence of complaining as a reflexive reaction to the painful psychophysiological pressure caused by ‘adversity’, a pressure figured in the hydraulic imagination of humoral theory as a weight released and thereby relieved in the outbursts of passionate speech. If the unwed Luciana were ‘to live to see like right bereft’, to find herself burdened by the constraints that bar women from the freedom that men enjoy, Adriana argues, she would know better than to speak as if ‘urging helpless patience would relieve me’ (2.1.40, 39). She would complain too.

This passage is exemplary of a broader phenomenon: the interweaving, across a variety of early modern discursive formations, of scenes of complaint with normative forms of ethical thought – including, as here, commonly held and culturally enforced beliefs about the immorality, irrationality and harmfulness of ‘complaining’. (In this context, ‘complaint’ and ‘complaining’ refer to everyday utterances that express grief, grievance and discontentment, rather than to the formal poems or songs of mourning with which the word is frequently associated.)