Louis Montrose: The Place of a Brother

Marriage is based in male strucctures of bonding; what happens in forest is contrivance to remedy what happens at home [Montrose ignore centrality of Rosalind as protagonist]

Rites of passage; action takes place between stages of the life cycle where identities are redefined; analogous to rites of passage.

Inheritance as social and individual --as well as financial structuring; property and love--Lear

primogeniture; plight of younger sons; play resolves some kind of class conflict--a flexible social custom.

Shakespeare changes Lodge's presentation of Sir Woland's will.

Father figures everywhere; patriarchal stage of society--difficulty of establishing or authenticating self in this framework. 35--Orlando's assertions of filial piety are self-assertions

Orlando's sturggle with elder Oliver is also Oedipal conflict; exchange between Charles and Orlando about lying with mother earth 37

Youth and Age--age gradations as important; demarcating age boundaries by movement through space; marriage the surest test of adult status--not until mid or late twenties--sexual repression--the forest is the world of transtion between youth and maturity.40 [in passing mention made of theatre as pastoral world of transitions]

Orlando moves from Adam to Duke Senior as father surrogates.

Fratricide is attempted and averted and repudiated in each sibling relationship. In the forest the old usurped duke is brother and co-mate but still king, like Henry V. This synthesizes the ideals of patriarchy and fraternity [NB: God the Father, vs. Jesus the Son and brother of Man--i.e. Joseph]

Shakespeare's discontented younger brothers can be villains: Richard Gloucester, Edmund, Antonio, Claudius--like Frederick; his violence is like Orlando's. He also identifies with Orlando in expropriating Oliver. Frederick finds an old man father figure in the forest too; and a spiritual inheritance.

Allegorical dream romance narrated by Oliver. 43--confronting older brother Oliver under oak is confrontation of patrilineal patriarchal order itself--the family tree. Snake and lion are not Oliver's animosities but Orlando's--self struggle and struggle with the lion in the text. This corresponds with Oliver's awkening. This event reverses the events that preciptated the action of the play. The bonds here are spiritual, established by allegory. Real brothers are turned to blood brothers--napkin.

p46. "What echoes deeply is 4th ch. of Gen...."primal eldest curse" ...The wrath of Cain [the eldest brother] echoes in Oliver's fratricidal musings...1..1.162-69 Oliver feels humanly rather than divinely misprized; and it is his tyrannical secular lord to whom he declares that he is not his brother's keeper. Orlando sheds his own blood for his elder brother, which beocmes the sign of Olliver's conversion rather than the mark of his fratricidal guilt. Oliver finds acceptance in the old Duyke, who commits him to his brother's love. Shakespeare is creating a resonance between his romantic fiction and Biblical history..."

[Story of younger brother and redistribution of gifts of fortune also alludes to Robin Hood]

Marriage is the mechanism of atonement between younger and older brothers; chiasmic structure.

Orlando divides time between courting Ganymede and "courting" Duke Senior. Rosalind is transferring her affectiojn from her father and Celio to Orland; he is going for her father.

Back to the mystery scene, 50. Orlando escapes from the oral agression of Ros. Ganymede in 4.1.170 to comfort of dinner with the Duke and the stag boys--all victims of women. snake and lionness are also vicious females. Lionness' ambivalent nurturing and aggressive aspects are strongly and ambivalnetly stressed. Rosalind and lion are coyly linked--wound of claws of lion or eyes of lady 5.2.19-23--snake around his neck is like chain around Orlando's; erotic serpent and maternal lioness; mastery of lionness is mastery of Rosalind and triumph of fraternity--also a form of matricide necessary to reestablish male bonding society, freeing the brothers capacity to give and receive love.[Oliver's lands are no longer his to give]

"Fraternity [sic] as a defense against the threat men feel from women" 51

For Craig: ""The Dyuke;s paternal bond to Orland is not establshed through the natural fertility of a mother but throught the supernatural virgnity of a daughter: "Good duke recieve they daughter/Hymen from heaven brought her "5.4.110-11--Why is Hymen male?

Rosalind's dominance has been a bit of holiday misrule whose context is a transfer of property