“Bedtrick: sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else.” [Introduction, Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, University of Chicago, 2000.]
Two of Shakespeare’s plays, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, make use of the plot device called a bedtrick, an ancient motif in stories—and occasionally in life, according to Wendy Doniger’s study, which shares a title with my novel.
Doniger is intrigued by masquerade and pretense in sexual encounters—for her, from a mythic point of view. Thus her definition of the term “bedtrick” is broader than that in Shakespeare’s plays. The overall definition of a bedtrick is a lie about sex, whatever form that lie takes.
In these two so-called problem comedies of Shakespeare, the man sleeps with a woman who gives him her virginity while he believes she’s someone else—consummation with a reluctant groom. Mariana, in Measure for Measure, and Helena, in All’s Well, each loves her misbehaving partner and willingly engages in the bedrick.
According to Doniger, this sort of bedtrick was legal, and she documents cases to prove it. She adds that in fact, such a deception could be regarded as a valid way to secure a husband. Some men, however, may agree with Stanley Wells’ assertion in Shakespeare, Sex, and Love, that it’s tantamount to rape: the man does not desire union with this particular woman..
Before Measure for Measure opens, the zealously puritanical Angelo was espoused to Mariana. They exchanged mutual consent, but when her dowry was lost at sea, he refused to marry her. Here the bedtrick has Angelo believing he beds Isabella, novitiate in a convent, while actually consummating his bond to Mariana. In the final scene the Duke orders the missing step: Angelo must solemnize his marriage to Mariana.
In All’s Well, Bertram’s marriage to Helena, dictated by the King of France, is solemnized before a priest against his will. Immediately after the wedding, Bertram flees to the Tuscan wars, vowing never to bed her. Helena follows him in the disguise of a pilgrim and befriends Diana, the woman Bertram is attempting to seduce. Diana agrees to a bedtrick: she’ll plan to meet Bertram in the night and Helena will take her place. Not only does Helena bed Bertram, but she secures his ring–and becomes pregnant.
The ending of neither play convinces us that these will be happy unions—and in Measure for Measure there are two additional intended marriages with questionable outcomes: the Duke’s to Isabella and Lucio’s to the whore Kate Keepdown.
In Shakespeare’s Common Prayers, Daniel Swift says that the “cautious sequence of consent and devotion” of the marriage rite builds “a vision of order and grace.” (97) Marriage is ordained for the procreation of children, the remedy against sin and fornication, and “mutual society, help, and comfort, both in prosperity and adversity.” It is a social structure and a personal one, of benefit to the individual, church, and community.
However, the marriage ritual also imagines rupture. After he summarizes the reasons for marriage, the priest addresses the audience: “Therefore, if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak.” He describes in detail possible impediments to marriage and concludes that if any exist, “Solemnization must be deferred until such time as the truth be tried.” (98-99)
A moment of hushed suspense in the church: will someone suddenly speak up and uncover a scandal, or will silence reign? If silence prevails, the priest continues: “Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife” and so on.
In a sense, both these plays deal with impediments to marriage. They’re classified as comedies in Shakespeare’s First Folio, meaning that they end in marriage as his comedies generally do. But they are his last comedies, and by the time of writing All’s Well, “Shakespeare’s dramatic interest in the flow of plot was succeeded by a heightened interest in obstruction.” (104)
Since Frederick Boas first used the term in 1896, All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida have been known as problem plays. (Boas included Hamlet among them). All are set in “highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness.” Indcidientally, all these plays were written and first performed during the time of my novel: 1599-1603, as the long reign of Queen Elizabeth comes to an end.
The marriages at the end of Measure for Measure and All’s Well are unsatisfactory: they lack clear consent. “Even as the three elements of the marriage rite—contract, solemnization, and consummation—are here specifically named, they are also emptied of their devotional and emotional value.” (111) Swift calls them “hollow ceremonies and grotesque parodies” of the ideal ceremony: “these are dramas of precisely the impediment that the marriage rite conjures.” (111)
In both cases, the impediment has been resolved by a bedtrick “in which the men are fooled into a consummation with their own wives.”
Swift points out that Measure for Measure and All’s Well “divorce sex from love and rite from promise: they dismantle, with close specificity, the separate elements that make up the structure of marriage.” He refers to them as “tormented sad plays,” where the bedtrick “exploits both the hopes and fears implicit to the orthodox structure of marriage.” When the priest asks for an impediment, the tense silence in the congregation comes from fear: the “nightmare just beneath the clarity of the rite’s bounded world.” (111-112)
Before concluding his chapter with a discussion of Othello, Swift talks about the various theories regarding Shakespeare’s own marriage to Anne Hathaway. Those who write about it give alternative stories of faithfulness, of adultery. His plays, so often disquieting about marriage, leave the answer open.
Although my novel Bedtrick doesn’t employ Shakespeare’s plot device, it too is problematical so far as marriage goes. Here, the lie about sex is different, as is the outcome. A seemingly overwhelming impediment— the ‘husband’ is a woman—remains secret when the union is solemnized and, sometime later after endless complications, the union is consummated.