The Master and the Bard

There came a point during my reading of Joy in the Morning when I really thought that Wodehouse was pulling my leg.  The speed with which engagements were created and then broken, then mended, only the be split assumer again, is simply astounding.  As a reader, I was constantly left wondering if the plot machinations would end in such a way that things would end as they started; with two couples happily betrothed, and with our hero Bertie devoid of any obligation to don the sponge bag trousers* and present himself at a church.

It then struck me that this was not the first time that I was presented with multiple romantic situations gone higgledy-piggedly.  Many many many years ago, when I was young and dinosaurs were known to roam the neighborhoods, I was Helena in my high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Granted, fairies have not been known to drug any Wodehouse characters (although Jeeves has slipped a mickey or two when the situation calls), but the romantic alacrity is comparable.  In fact, that thread runs through a great many of the Bard’s works, and not simply the comedies.  Indeed, Romeo, at the beginning of that teenaged tragedy, was enamored of the fair Rosalind, not Juliet.  The trope probably even predates Shakespeare, who was a great hoarder of plots and is unlikely to have been the literary progenitor of the implausibly fast and complicated romance. 

Marching through history, I note that the trope continued on through the works of Austen.  I am not terribly au fait with contemporary popular so-called women’s literature, but I would suspect that it persists up until this day.**  I believe that there is something about the human psyche that yearns for sudden complete love and adoration, because goodness knows that’s much easier than trawling around the likes of Match.com looking for your dream-rabbit.  Humans also possess the ability to mock their deepest desires, hence the fact that sudden romance and its perils are often the subject of mockery.  As a species, we have an awfully cruel streak when it comes to bare emotion. 

Wodehouse himself acknowledged that silliness of it all in this book, as he said on page 152: “You can’t go by what a girl says, when she’s giving you the devil for making a chump out of yourself.  It’s like Shakespeare.  Sounds well, but does not mean anything.” Or, in the words of Puck, “What fools these mortals be!”

*Short of perusing the internet (which is a tedious proposition on the commuter rail.  There is an internet connection, and in times of desperation I have accessed it, but it keeps insisting on either being slow or nonexistent.) I have no idea what sponge bag trousers are, or how they came to have that name.  I can only assume they are the trousers that are properly donned with a morning coat. 

**Granted, there are a couple of hundred years between now and the Georgian period.  My defense is that, as a trained historian, the time span is a mere eye-blink in the annals of mankind.