SOURCE: Adelman, Janet. “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies.” In Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 73-103. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1985.

In the following essay, Adelman traces developments in Shakespeare's treatment of male friendship from the early to middle comedies through the tragedies and late romances.

In this essay, I want to examine a concern articulated in Shakespeare's earliest comedies and then apparently abandoned, returning with new force not in comedy but in tragedy and romance. The concern is with a male identity that locates itself via bonding with another man and recognizes in women a disturbance to the bond and to the identity so constituted.¹ The apparent disappearance and reappearance of the same material in greatly intensified form may suggestively be seen as analogous to the process of repression and the return...