'Clamber' and 'clamb'ring' always occur in verse-initial position, and clambering is always something done by women to escape the constraints of their normal lives. In The Merchant of Venice Shylock tells his daughter to stay away from the temptations of the street:
28 What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:
29 Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum
30 And the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife,
31 Clamber not you up to the casements then,
32 Nor thrust your head into the public street
33 To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces;
(MeV 2.5.28-33)
In a similar spirit, the tribune Brutus deplores the popular attention Coriolanus is receiving especially from women:
205 All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights
206 Are spectacled to see him. Your prattling nurse
207 Into a rapture lets her baby cry
208 While she chats him; the kitchen malkin pins
209 Her richest lockram 'bout her reechy neck,
210 Clamb'ring the walls to eye him; (Cor.2.1.205-210)
The final occurrence evokes a pastoral rather than a street scene, but Ophelia's clambering can also be usefully interpreted as an attempted escape:
172 There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds
173 Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
174 When down her weedy trophies and herself
175 Fell in the weeping brook.
A historian of drama with a long view might think of the opening scene of the Phoenician Women which goes to elaborate lengths to show how Antigone looks at the public scene of civil from inside the wall of a tower.
08 February 2000