SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

Based on the ideas of ancient Greek and Roman comic playwrights, we may divide comedy very broadly into two distinct categories:

The Satiric: Such comedy concerns a middle way of life, town-dwellers, humble and private persons. It pursues the principal characters with some bitterness for their vices and teaches what is useful and expedient in life, and what is to be avoided. It is sometimes called the comedy of "humours" since it is much more concerned with characters or personality\types\than with individual characters. As a result most of the characters tend to be flat: that is, they are very predictable and one-dimensional. They always act the same way and never surprise; consequently, they are easy to ridicule.

The Romantic: Such comedy expresses the idea that life is to be grasped. It has a great variety of plot which may include a light touch of danger from which there is always a happy ending. Indeed, romantic comedy is characterized by stories that begin in sorrow, danger, or hardship, move through various difficulties, and are resolved, sometimes through a turn in fortune, in happiness. They are tales of trouble that turn into joy.

Actually, the word comedy comes from the Latin words comos, village, and oda, a song; thus, comedy literally means a sort of rustic song and is most closely aligned with the notion of romantic comedy. Historically, satiric comedy is linked with the ancient Greek and Roman writer and the writers during the Renaissance; romantic comedy is linked with the medieval writers. The medieval formula for comedy leads to the Beatific Vision (consider Dante's Divine Comedy and to a lesser degree Chaucer); the Renaissance formula leads no further than the day of Judgment and is principally concerned with punishment. The medieval or Christian vision sees love as the cause and crown of life; the classical or pagan sees a useful morality. The best pagan faith offers Justice; Christianity offer Mercy and Forgiveness.

Shakespearean comedy, in spite of the fact that he was historically a part of the Renaissance, falls into the medieval or romantic pattern. Almost all of Shakespeare's comedies are built up on a love story, often indeed on a group of love stories; lovers are united, faults are pardoned, enmities are reconciled. His comedies tend to affirm the basic harmony of life, though not in a sentimental fashion since many of them include the melancholy and the sinful. In addition, Shakespearean comedy celebrates marriage; indeed almost all his comedies conclude with marriage, often multiple ones. Marriage, thus, becomes a marker for that which has the fullest potential for happiness in the human experience.

SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

It is somewhat artificial to talk about Shakespearean comedies, histories, and tragedies since he did not write sharply distinguished types of drama. As a matter of fact, according to one critic: "There is hardly a Shakespearean tragedy in which the sound of laughter is not heard, hardly a comedy in which there is not at least the shadow of impending disaster" (Parrott vii). Shakespearean drama, like Elizabethan literature in general, is founded on a long tradition in medieval and early Renaissance literature, where the sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy maintained by the classical Greek and Roman writers was either unknown or ignored.

There are three dominant characteristics of Elizabethan comedy:

1) a native, often naive, realism,

2) a striving after the classical idea of form and order,

3) a recurrent urge to express in verse something of that beauty which lies beyond the reach of all the pens that ever poets held.

All three appear in Shakespearean comedy, although in differing degrees and mixtures; in his best work they blend in a harmony that lifts them high above the rank and file of Elizabethan plays and makes them a possession for all time.

In order to appreciate the long tradition that Shakespeare drew upon in developing his comedies, it is important to survey briefly the history of English drama. When all is said and done, however, regardless the debt Shakespeare owes to his predecessors, we must still acknowledge that it was his own peculiar and native genius which enabled him to create his plays.

Medieval Influences

I. Miracle Plays (c. 1100-1400)

English drama grew out of liturgical or miracle plays; the earliest liturgical plays were simple representations of the two main events of Christianity:

1) the birth of Christ

2) the resurrection of Christ

Such serious material was hardly the place for comedy, but eventually the plays broaden out and began to include much more material. The Resurrection play stretched backwards in time to embrace the Passion of Christ and forward to the Ascension and finally the Day of Judgment. The Christmas play ran back to include figures of the prophets who had foretold the wondrous birth, and behind them to Eden and the Fall of Man. In these expanded plays comedy was easier to include; for this very reason, however, comedy and the irreverent laughter it provoked helped drive, somewhere in the thirteenth century, the drama out of the church and into the churchyard, the market place, or the village green.

Once out of the church, the plays came under control of the craft guilds, typically with a particular guild being responsible for a particular play indentified with that guild. For instance, a play about Noah and the Ark would be performed by the Shipwright's Guild. Thus, when the clergy lost control of the performances, edification yielded to the more popular aim of entertainment and so comedy was more apt to appear. Still, most of these early guild plays were serious affairs, with long paraphrases of Scripture and a serious and didactic purpose as the focus of the play. Comedy gradually became more and more a part of these plays as the various guilds sought larger audiences. Nevertheless, it must be underscored that within the miracle plays comedy was almost always incidental; it never overshadowed the dramatic story itself.

The comic elements of these plays are worth noting, especially since many of them passed down into Elizabethan and Shakespearean drama.

1) The simplest and most primitive form of comedy is that of action--sudden, incongruous, and laughter-moving (eg., Chevy Chase's falls, the old pie-in-the-face play, etc). The action is for the most part naively realistic, emphasizing a kind of rough and tumble, almost slapstick mode.

2) Action combined with the spoken word, in particular, dirty language. Indeed, many of the plays are filled with profanity, much of it having to do with oaths and inappropriate swearing. Language, like the action described above, tends to be simple and realistic. There is no attempt to play with the subtlties of the spoken word.

3) Social and political satire on commonplace topics: the miseries of married life with special reference to shrewish wives; oppression of the poor by the gentry; ill-treatment of servants by stingy masters.

4) A higher form of comedy appears when the playwright's art enables him to present amusing and laughable characters. Here we have the beginning of the clownish comic character, perhaps best typified by Mak from\The Second Shepherd's\play.

Most of these comic elements do appear in some form in Shakespearean comedy.

II. Morality Plays (c. 1375-1550)

Growing quite naturally out of the miracle plays were the morality plays that first began to appear around 1375. A morality play, unlike the miracle play which is concerned with specific Biblical stories, may be defined as dramatized allegory with didactic intent. Indeed, the morality play fastened upon the sermon with its ethical and didactic purpose and utilized entertaining anecdote and dramatic dialogue. Like the sermon, the morality play aimed to strenghten the believer in his warfare against the sins that so easily beset mankind. The central theme of most of the plays was the deadly contest evil had to win the soul of man. This contest, invariably ending in the defeat of the evil powers, gave the plays a certain uniformity if not monotony. In order to combat such monotony and subsequent boredom, writers began to use more and more comic elements.

As a matter of fact, while comedy was only incidental in the early miracle plays, in the morality plays it came to occupy an essential and even dominating role. A chronological survey of these plays will show the increasing tendency to subordinate the original purpose of ethical edification to a frank effort to entertain the audience by an increasing emphasis upon the comic.

Morality plays use the same comic techniques they inherited from the miracles, only expanded and extended. Rough-and-tumble action scenes are still present, but the language of the plays begins to be more sophisticated and playful. There is plenty of "flyting" or comic shouting matches, puns, malaprops, distortions of foreign languages, rural dialects, and songs. Perhaps the most distinctive mark of the morality plays was their use of the character Vice, often a devil or Satan himself, but always a evil force. Vice could be nothing more than the typical melodramatic villain or he could be a more prankish figure, using all kinds of tricks and devices to thwart the hero of the play.

Once again, each of these distinctives of comedy from the morality plays appears eventually in Shakespearean comedy.

The Classical Influence

It may seem out of order to talk about the influence of ancient Greek and Latin playwrights upon Shakespeare's comedies after the Medieval influences we have just discussed; actually, however, it is very natural to do so because it was only during the Renaissance (1400-1550) that the classical Greek and Latin playwrights (the most notable being Plautus and Terence) were re-discovered and their surviving manuscripts translated and published. This re-discovery revolutionized Elizabethan theater and made lasting and significant impact upon how the plays were written.

Specifically, the classical writers influenced Elizabethan playwrights and the theater in the following two ways:

1) Elizabethan writers were quick to pick up on the classical convention of dividing plays in acts and scenes.

2) Perhaps more important, the primary contribution of classical comedy was form, that is the recognition of the value of plot construction.

The Renaissance Influence

Besides the re-discovery of the classsical writers, the Renaissance influenced Elizabethan playwrights in other ways.

1) The world view of many people gradually shifted away from a Heaven or Hell mentality to an enjoyment of life upon the earth. This led to the spirit of discovery--geographically, intellectually, and aesthetically.

2) There came an increasing tendency to write about this new view of the world in appropriate language. As a result, English poetry underwent a complete transformation in the sixteenth century; new forms (the sonnet and blank verse), new themes (especially Petrarchan love-longing), and new intensity within the lyric itself were expressed.

3) There developed for the first time in English drama the "love interest," or the theme of romantic love. Perhaps this element is most influential in terms of Shakespearean comedy since a great many of his most successful comedies may be called romantic comedies.

4) The character of Vice from the old morality plays is less often identified with the devil; instead, in general he plays the part of a witty jester, able to extricate himself from all kinds of scrapes. Again, the vast number of Shakespearean clowns may be linked to this subtle transformation.

Elizabethan Influences

Before a fully developed English drama could arise, two specific things had to occur. First, professional actors had to be available, and, second, permanent theaters had to be constructed. Both of these conditions were fulfilled during the early Elizabethan period.

In addition, there were three important playwrights who directly influenced Shakespeare:

1) John Lyly (1553 or 1554-1606)

2) George Peele (1557-1596)

3) Robert Greene (1558-1592)

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

1) The plots are almost never probable or true to life; Shakespeare's aim is to take us out of real life into a more agreeable imaginative region. Since he is catering to an audience longing to be taken out of their lives and not to see the sort of events that happen in their own lives, Shakespeare chooses stories that turn on some fantastic hypothesis, event, or coincidence.

2) Them same is true of the inhabitants; hero and heroine alike are figures of romance, beautiful, gallant, witty, and charming. The heroines in particular tend to dominate the comedies; almost never does Shakespeare satirize his heroines while his heroes are often playfully mocked.

3) The rough-and-tumble comic farce of the miracles and moralities is present at times, but usually mute.

4) Wit--puns, quips, repartee, and word play are everywhere.

5) Musical language--blank verse--lyrical, light, sweet, and playful.

6) Literal music--many, many songs.

7) The use of disguises, and, related to this, constant instances of mistaken identity. Though the disguise motive may seem artificial to those of us nutured on realism, for the Elizabethans it was an accepted convention for a number of reasons: it set up complications in the plot, it fulfilled the audience's expectations, it often led to a neat termination of the play, and it set up complicated character situations since a disguised character was practically two persons--1) for the other characters in the play who are deceived, and 2) for the spectators who enjoy being in the know; this two-sided situation creates many opportunities for veiled allusion, double meaning, dramatic irony, and subtlety of dialogue.

8) The typical pattern in the comedies is of "a poem changing a sad beginning into a happy ending."

9) Marriages, at the beginning, middle, or end, tend to be a focal point of all the early comedies. Most often Shakespeare is concerned only with the love and wooing that leads to marriage. Consequently, he tends to avoid ridiculing love, and he avoids scenes dealing with fornication or adultery.

10) Fully-developed characters who are interesting and attractive. We come to believe in the story because we believe in the people in it. Shakespeare's insight into strengths but especially the weaknesses of human nature is perhaps his greatest gift, and he exercises it freely in the comedies. In a sense this may be the root source of his humor. That is, Shakespeare shows man is comic because he is by nature a victim of his own illusions. Yet Shakespeare does not laugh at individual men because they are weak or vain or affected. Rather, he laughs at all mankind, himself included, because their very essence is a bundle of contradictions, born to desire something they will never get, or that will never satisfy them if they get. Shakespeare's comedy is emotional, fanciful, tender, and human.

(notes taken from Thomas Marc Parrott's Shakespearean Comedy and Kenneth Muir's "Introduction" to Shakespeare: The Comedies.)

SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY (HAPPY, ROMANTIC) COMEDIES

1) In the early comedies (ERRORS, TWO GENTLEMEN, LOVE'S LABORS, SHREW, MIDSUMMER'S, MERCHANT, MUCH ADO, AS YOU LIKE IT, TWELFTH, AND MERRY WIVES) the one shared quality is "happiness, a serene happiness, liable to develop into merriment in the conclusion, yet threatening to become serious at times, otherwise there would be no play.

2) Most of the plays are set in a continental or Mediterranean background.

3) The clown or fools have significant roles (at least two can be found in each play). Not only is it the fool's function to initiate laughter (omnipresent in these plays by the way); in addition, they reveal fundamental truths often overlooked by others: 1) that the deepest and greatest things in life may be hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto children and fools, 2) that no matter how laughed at by the world, they ultimately have access to higher court, and 3) that what wins our affection is not wealth, power, or intellect, but is instead humanity, native and unassuming. To summarize, they appeal not to the mind but to the heart.

4) Witty dialogue among the gentry.

5) Stories dealing with merchants and mercantile life.

6) Love and Friendship among persons of high rank. The basic pattern involves a quartet of characters, two men and two women, stimulated by the rival claims of love and friendship. Perhaps their most salient feature is "the theme of faithful love subjected to some grievous and abnormal strain." Some of the difficulties are as follows: natural mischance, the whims of a tyrannical ruler or father, or the unmotivated evil directed specifically against or indirectly affecting the lovers themselves. Yet in almost every case, the lovers are never simply at the mercy of outside forces. Indeed, one or both of the lovers bear some responsibility for the difficulties the course of their wooings takes. Often the barrier between the lovers reflects some delusion or spiritual blindness in the lovers. Furthermore, love is never presented as an isolated phenomenon; instead, it is a power that reaches into every sphere of human activity. Its characteristics are self-denial, unselfishness, and complete loyalty; its essence is giving. Consequently, the love story is invariably set in a larger context from which the difficulties of the lovers in part derive. Indeed, it is the disorder of the larger world that intrudes upon the world of the lovers. At the same time, however, the kind of ideal love the plays often highlight do fundamentally affect the larger world. In its most obvious form this is shown in the active intervention of the heroines (who are invariably disguised). For instance, in\The Merchant of Venice\Porrtia personally foils Shylock's murderous intentions and her actions are symbolic of the power of love itself--its generosity, mercy, and charity.

(notes taken from John Dover Wilson's Shakespeare's Happy Comedies and Norman Sanders' "The Comedy of Greene and Shakespeare," in Early Shakespeare.)