First Paper

COLLECTIVE PAPER 2

Subject : Shakespeare through performance

Student´s name : Fayos Juliá, Aroa-Lara

Title of the paper : " Recurrent Patterns in Shakespearian Comedies "

Author or topic : Shakespeare, William

Introduction

The present paper is but a revision of a previous one that was handed in on November 7^th, 2006 and presented in front of our classmates and Dr. Vicente Forés López, our “Curso monográfico de literatura inglesa: “Shakespeare through performance” professor, the same day.

The reason for writing this second paper on the same subject as the first one is simple and we think understandable. We felt that the first paper was handed in incomplete, and this happened because the time we were given for its writing, too short, and the organization if not lacking, at least chaotic. Also, our professor advised us to keep studying the same subject, to improve the paper we already had because the information we had given was insufficient or badly presented.

Given the fact that the time given for writing the first paper was rather short and the organization, as we have already said, chaotic, we decided to write a first draft of it, and the person in charge of doing it was Dana Cristea. Then the paper passed on to some of us, namely to Maria Clement Quesada, Victor Colon Garcia, Karla Diaz de Heredia Garcia and Maria Carmen Ferrando Oñate, who contributed with information that was not mentioned in the first draft. The presentation of this first paper was in charge of the above mentioned and of Rita Costell Chueca, as well as Claire Louise Young.

For the present paper we decided that the people who did not contribute with information in the first paper, that is Juan Enrique Tortajada Gimeno, Rita Costell Chueca, Aroa Lara Fayos Julia and Begoña Espert Sanchez, these people should find the recurring patterns in “The Taming of the Shrew”, a task that our professor recommended us to do. They are also in charge of adding a new chapter to the paper, which did not appear in the original paper, that is to find out whether the recurring patterns we have encountered in William Shakespeare’s comedies are to be applied to all comedies, or whether they are peculiar to him. Claire Louise Young will enlarge the information we had in the original paper about confusion, a subject which we consider we did not do justice to. The others, as well as the above mentioned persons, will try to fit in the paper and the recurring patterns we have encountered, the characters of “The Comedy of Errors”, “The Taming of the Shrew” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, characters which have been the subject for the first individual paper that we had to hand in on November 28^th, 2006.

Explained the methodology followed, we consider it necessary to also explain why we have chosen this theme, the recurrent patterns in Shakespearian comedies, as the theme of our paper. At first we chose another title for the paper, and we searched for information fitting the title “what makes a Shakespearian play a comedy”. Later we realized while reading critical books and on-line sources, that there are things that are repeated in more than one comedy, that there are some obvious reoccurring patterns in the comedies by William Shakespeare, hence deciding to write the paper about these recurrent patterns.

As we have mentioned above we have used many critical books, companions to Shakespeare, on-line articles about the subject that interested us, all of which are acknowledged throughout the paper, and finally as well in the bibliography. We have also read many of William Shakespeare’s comedies, something without which we could not have written our paper, because how can one speak about a comedy or about various comedies without having read them. So, in the course of our paper we shall make reference to some of the following Shakespearian plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; All’s Well That Ends Well; As You Like It; Cymbeline; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Measure for Measure; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Much Ado about Nothing; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Taming of the Shrew; The comedy of Errors; The Tempest; Twelfth Night, or What You Will; Troilus and Cressida; The Two Noble Kinsmen; The Winter’s Tale. They are what we know as comedies (for further knowledge on what we call a comedy, please see the next chapter), although many critics would argue that Troilus and Cressida; Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well are “problem plays”, while Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest are “romances”. We shall make no distinction here and we may refer to any of the above plays.

The next chapter, although it may seem without relation to the others, gives a general introduction to the paper. It also was the introduction of the previous paper and we feel that it should not be lost, even if it guards little relation with the rest of the paper. Nevertheless, it pays homage to the genius of William Shakespeare, and we could not do less but to keep the next few pages present in this second paper.

Chapter one

General considerations on William Shakespeare and his comedies

In 1964, Robert Graves noted that “the remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say that he is very good.”¹ This remark gives but a glimpse of the great influence that Shakespeare exerted over a large proportion of the world’s population. Never before, nor after, did a secular imaginative writer has had such success and has wakened such admiration among his contemporaries and later generations. William Shakespeare is looked upon as a universal genius that outshone all his contemporaries and managed to outshine every writer every since. His genius is to be found in the freshness of his verse, in his capacity of pleasing theatre goers today, as he has done for the past four hundred years, in his ability and his luck (for want of a better word) of writing about subjects that were and still are even today, universal subjects, that are interesting today as they were at the time he wrote about them. Every representation of his works brings forth new themes, new ideas, new ways of looking at things. Shakespeare draws his power from each and every one of the representations of his works, from the light in which each and every one of us sees these works, because each time we think about the genius behind the wonders we are beholding, we reinvent Shakespeare. And we always get to the same conclusion. That he is really very good, in spite of all these who say he is very good.

What do we really know about Shakespeare? One unfounded myth claims that what we know about his life could be written on the back of a postage stamp². In fact, we know a lot about some of the less exciting aspects of Shakespeare’s life, such as business deals and tax debts, but this is not the object of the present work. What we are interested in is Shakespeare’s literary production, which, although not extremely extensive, stands, as we have said before, as the best and the most important one in the whole history of literature.

Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays, a sequence of 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems and various short poems. But nothing is as simple as it seems with any of the things concerning Shakespeare. Even this simple enumeration becomes complicated, when we take into consideration that at least two of the plays were co-authored with fellow playwright John Fletcher, that another couple of plays attributed to Shakespeare never really reached us, that Shakespeare wrote passages for an play and that we do not have an accurate catalogue of the shorter poetry.³ But verifying the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays is not our purpose. The purpose of this work goes further than a simple enumeration of comedies, tragedies, histories (the subgenres which Shakespearian plays have been divided into), sonnets, long poems, collaborations, etc.

Our main interest and the theme of this work, as we have already said in the introduction, is the comedy, and specifically those elements that make a Shakespearian play a comedy. We will try to identify those elements and analyze them in the following chapters, as well as trying to observe whether there is a recurring, whether those elements appear in more than one play, or whether they are peculiar if given a certain comedy. But before we get to that, let us look at what we understand by the term comedy

“Comedy” has a classical meaning (comical theatre) and a popular one (the use of humor with an intent to provoke laughter in general). In the theatre, its Western origins are in ancient Greece, like tragedy, a genre characterized a grave fall from grace by a protagonist having a high social standing. Comedy, in contrast, portrays a conflict between a young hero and an older authority, a confrontation described by Northrop Frye as a struggle between a society of youth and a society of the old.

Humor being subjective, one may or may not find something humorous because it is either too offensive or not offensive enough. Comedy is judged according to a person’s taste. Some enjoy cerebral fare as irony or black comedy; others may prefer scatological humor (e.g. the “fart joke”) or slapstick.⁴

In Shakespeare’s time, comedy was considered a lower genre than tragedy, just as tragedy was considered a lower genre than epic. This consideration was due to the fact that many writers followed Aristotle’s Poetics, a work focused on tragedy, so there existed no theory of comedy. A common definition of comedy at that time was given by George Whetstone in the prologue to Promos and Cassandra (1578) and it reads:

“grave old men should instruct; young men should show the imperfections of youth; strumpets should be lascivious; boys unhappy; and clowns should speak disorderly; intermingling all these actions, in such sort, as the grave matter may instruct and the pleasant delight”⁵.

Nevertheless, many playwrights, and Shakespeare foremost, ignored the boundaries between the playful and serious, blurring the supposed lines between the two main genres of the age, tragedy and comedy, and introducing comic elements into the tragedies and also (increasingly after 1600) tragic elements into comedies.

So, if we know that comedies have tragic elements and tragedies comic elements, then the natural question arises: is there any difference between comedy and tragedy? The answer is, of course affirmative. A simplified contrast of tragedy and comedy will say that comedy begins with disorder and ends in order, while with tragedy is the other way round. All plots involve threats and danger, in tragedies these threats are fulfilled, but in comedies they are evaded. All of Shakespeare’s characters face alienation, abandonment, death, but in comedies there is some kind of “evitability” that breaks the chain of misfortune and leads the situation towards a happy ending, towards life, because comedy celebrates life, the promise of life, whereas tragedy ends with death, with dead bodies that litter the stage

To give another definition of comedy, we could say that comedy refers to a literary structure, be it drama, novel or film, that moves towards a happy ending and implies a positive understanding of human experience. Comedy is usually funny, but that is not a prerequisite. A comedy must always end happily, a happy ending involves marriage, or at least some kind of union or reunion that resolves the conflict and brings the characters together, in a state of harmony. In other words, a comedy moves “from confusion to order, from ignorance to understanding, from law to liberty, from unhappiness to satisfaction, from separation to union, from bareness to fertility, from singleness to marriage.”⁶

So far, from the definitions we have given, we can easily encounter a few of the elements that are essential to a comedy, that make a given play a comedy (namely, happy ending, marriage or the promise of marriage, obstacles that we shall later describe, etc). In the following chapters we shall deal with all these elements, trying to explain them, trying to see why they are important in the whole of the text and how they have helped to create the atmosphere of the comedy, why the audience expects to encounter these elements in a comedy and so on.

Chapter two

Happy ending

As we have said in the previous chapter, humor and laughter are not prerequisite in Shakespearian comedies, but its main attraction is laughter that comes from wordplay, intricate plotting and occasional “pies in the face”. But the “happiness” that we associate with comedy comes from the fact that we are aware and familiar with the conventions of drama, with the natural ending of a comedy. We know that nothing bad will happen to a character because we know that he/she is protected under the comfortable blanket of comedy and its conventions. We also know that everything will end up ordered and safe, and for that reason we laugh. We laugh at the world because we know it will end up ordering the chaos. And although that order comes only in the last five or ten minutes of the play, the expectation of it and what occurs before it, the misunderstanding, the confusion, the foolishness, the evil, are what really make us laugh. In the end we laugh at life (which in a way becomes the evil character who tries to put down the main character and to stop him/her from being happy), because the human being is shown as small and silly, but he/she still manages to be happy

A happy ending is thus the main feature of Shakespearian comedy, a prerequisite to it, whereas, as we have said before, humor and laughter are not. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare dedicates his energy in amplifying the confusion generated by the two sets of twins. The play is hilarious, but several years later, in an another twin comedy, Twelfth Night, although the confusion still provokes laughter, the play fails to be hilarious, due mainly to the fact that the author complicates the tone of it by exploring the pleasures of romantic love and offering large doses of melancholy and music. Does that mean that some comedies are more comic than others? Definitely yes, but it does not mean that some comedies are “more of a comedy” than others.

As we have said before, a happy ending is a prerequisite to a comedy, but Shakespeare chose to create some endings “happier” than others. They are the so-called “problematic endings”, in which the promised marriage is delayed, or in some way compromised. It is the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where a messenger enters amid the jollity of the final scene and announces the death of the Princess’s father. The wedding is thus postponed for a year, and the main male character is sent to “exercise his wit among the sick”⁷. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the usual marriage is a forced one between a persistent young woman and a personally unappealing man who repeatedly declared he does not want her. And the examples could continue, but we must remark that, chronologically, the endings of Shakespeare’s comedies reveal an increasing emphasis on satirical or melancholic elements which complicate and disturb the serenity of the happy ending. But that happy ending does exist, all of Shakespeare’s comedies have it.

If we consider individual characters, and making reference to the individual papers of the members of the Secretarial team, Dana Cristea, in her analysis of the character Luciana in The Comedy of Errors has noted that although the comedy ends happily, we have to suppose that Luciana is going to be happy. It must be kept in mind that a woman’s purpose in life was to get married and bear children, but Luciana says she “will marry one day, but to try”⁸, so her main worry is not getting married. However, we are invited to suppose that she is going to be happy with the design that Shakespeare, through the voice of Antipholus of Syracuse, has chosen for her. She utters no word about this future marriage, but the audience and the reader expects it, because this is the natural ending for a comedy, and Luciana has to be happy about her marriage. As we shall see in the next chapter, happy ending meant marriage or the promise of a marriage for William Shakespeare.

In her analysis of “The Comedy of Errors” María Clement has also found that Antipholus of Ephesus takes part, as well as in others, in this “happy ending” pattern: the story´s plot is build upon the fact that a family has been broken, ie: we set off from a sad situation in which Antipholus of Ephesus is one of the main protagonists. He ignores that both his father and his brother are looking for him and cannot understand the sudden trouble that surrounds his life the day that the comedy takes place, and why all his peaceful acknowledged existence abruptly changes into unbearable confusion (but that will be discussed later on) so when at the end of the play the family is completely reunited and composure has been reestablished, we have what we know as a happy ending.

As in the other comedies, in Midsummer Night’s Dream we have a happy ending in which everything is restored. When the four lovers (Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena) wake up in the wood, they think that all what has happened has been a dream and they forget everything. So, Lysander shows his love again to Hermia and Demetrius also loves Helena. At the end, Theseus (Duke of Athens) overrules Egeus and commands the wedding between Hermia and Lysander, who is the man she has chosen. As we have mentioned before, here there is a promise of marriage that means happy ending.

Chapter three

Marriage

It must seem strange that we have begun our analysis of the basic elements of a Shakespearian comedy with the ending, but we have not done so randomly. The happy ending is a sine qua non condition of a Shakespearian comedy and of comedies in general. For this reason we have chosen this order of analysis.

For Shakespeare, a happy ending meant marriage or the promise of a marriage or the restoration of a marriage, although this last situation is not very frequent (we have it in The Comedy of Errors, where Egeon and Aemilia are reunited after thirty-three years of separation). But marriage is the ending of the play, but life does not end with it. Even more, life begins with marriage, and when we say this, we are making reference to the consummation of marriage, to sex, the act of union between a man and a woman and its result, a new life.

Marriage exists in all of Shakespeare’s comedies, because, let us not forget, comedies are about life, and marriage is about giving life, and although a comedy ends with marriage, the audience and the reader knows that this particular ending, or this particular feature of a comedy reassures us of the continuity of life.

For Luciana in The Comedy of Errors, the promise of a marriage appears only in the end, or at least for her it does. But she somehow has no saying in that. She cannot give Antipholus of Syracuse an answer because other characters do not let her. So we wonder ourselves whether we shall have a marriage or not.

Antipholus of Ephesus is already married to Adriana, more than marriage, when speaking about him we must undoubtly refer to his adultery: confusion in the play leads Antipholus to believe that Adriana has committed adultery and therefore revenges by being unfaithful with a prostitute. Being marriage a recurrent pattern in Shakespeare´s plays we should also mention adultery and the fact of breaking your vows.

This recurrent pattern can also be observed in Midsummer Night’s Dream, mainly in relation to the character of Hermia. She is in love of Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. As we have seen before, in most of Shakespearean comedies marriage is present, but sometimes it is not so easy to reach, in this case because of parental disapproval. At this time in this society, aristocrats, husbands and fathers were the dominant voices; in the case of fathers they decided to whom their daughter should marriage with, the best candidate was the worthiest.

In the play, Hermia opposes her father’s decision and even argues the Duke (Theseus), she prefers to die instead of marrying a man that she does not love. So, we could interpret this reaction as love challenging this authoritarian and patriarchal society. Finally, the play ends with a promise of marriage, which is allowed by the Duke, between Hermia and Lysander (so she will marry the man she loves) and even between Helena and Demetrius. As we have mentioned at the end of the previous chapter and at the beginning of this one, there is a close relation between marriage and happy ending.

Chapter four

Wooing

To arrive at this scenario where a wedding takes place, or the promise of a marriage is made, we have another element that is continually present in Shakespeare’s comedies, namely the wooing (which means “to sue for the affection of and usually marry with”⁹)

The primary forces behind the comic plots of Shakespeare’s comedies are the romantic sentiment and the erotic desire and the primary action is the overcoming of obstacles (if two characters really love each other they must overcome all obstacles that they are faced with), obstacles that stand in the way of the romantic and sexual fulfillment. The romantic sentiment is always bound up with wooing. Romanticism is about the elaboration of feelings which lead members of opposite sexes to idealize and to fantasize about each other. Wooing is about the approaches they make to each other in order to transmit their feelings and to awaken reciprocal feelings in the other. Wooing is thus the preliminary of marriage, and marriage is but the crowning point of the lives of the characters that appear in Shakespeare’s plays.

If marriage is the denouement of the comedy, wooing is undoubtedly the climax of it, the centre of the plot and its dialogue is concerned with the testing of emotional responses, which constitute the well-understood ritual of courtship.¹⁰ Wooing scenes are tests of the maturity and the humanity of the characters involved in them, and also points where the personal affairs intersect with public ones. They are also scenes apt for mockery and satire (usually these scene are the ones that carry most comical value), due to their excessive sentimentality.

The lover is an ambiguous figure, who may excite pity for his painful emotional condition, but also seems ridiculous because of his excessive virtuousness. Romance is almost always accompanied by features that are anti-romantic. The lover becomes a figure of awe and fun. His raptures may be a source of richly flowering, delicate poetry, but they may also lapse into an absurd recital of merely conventional clichés.¹¹ Orlando, in As You Like It write poems to Rosalind on trees, poems that Touchstone mocks for their poor style and which embarrass Rosalind herself.

Wooing is not a matter of two. There is a broader social context in which it necessarily functions, and personal choice determines a range of complexities in that society (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Egeus complains to Duke Theseus that his daughter Hermia does not want to marry the man he has chosen for her). Wooing is also a process of maturation, through it Orlando is emotionally educated by Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It. Other plays, such as Much Ado about Nothing or Twelfth Night, focus on a more practical form of wooing, a familiar procedure to Elizabethans, which take into consideration issues such as dowry, social status, strategy and control over one’s own feelings and actions. In The Taming of the Shrew however, there is no such thing as wooing, at least not between Kate and Petrucchio, the latter whom, on the other hand clearly admits that what he is really interested in is marrying a rich woman.

Wooing is thus one of the main elements of Shakespearian comedy and it is very important in the lives of the characters that are involved in, but we must bear in mind that even though the wooing and the comedy ends in marriage, there is still life after the marriage.

And there is still life after the wooing that is not marriage. Luciana in The Comedy of Errors is wooed, but in the confusion created by the two sets of twins, she believes that the man declaring his love to her is her sister’s husband, so she chooses to ignore his wooing. Nevertheless, she is surprised by it, and even flattered. She is “offered the opportunity” of having a submissive husband who is willing to be taught how to speak and think by his wife.

Through this wooing and the promise of a marriage between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse we are faced with a restoration of order. Virtually, Luciana stops being a no-person (in Elizabethan times an un-married woman was seen as a person who had no opinion and no voice in society) and Antipholus of Syracuse becomes complete.

We can also observe wooing in Midsummer Night’s Dream, since Demetrius loves Hermia and in a way he is picking on her in order to manage her. On the other hand, when the four lovers are in the wood under Puck’s charm, we can see that both Lysander and Demetrius are wooing Helena in order to win her. But we know that in the end Lysander loves Hermia and Demetrius loves Helena.

Chapter five

Women that dress as men

The conventions of comedies, as those of all literature are consistent with the customs of the society in which those pieces of literature were produced. Thus, Shakespearian comedies will reflect the society of early modern English, patriarchal and authoritarian, inhospitable to disorder or disruption. They represent the unshakable power of husbands, aristocrats and other dominant cultural voices. It is strange then, when we observe Shakespeare’s alliance with a woman in her refusal to marry the man her father has chosen for her (Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream rejects her father’s claim to marry the man he has chosen for her, and claims to marry the one she loves). This situation is but a reflection of the cultural anxiety pervading this period, when notions of romantic love began to challenge the norms of patriarchal authority in the matter of marriage¹². We see thus another recurrent element in Shakespearian comedies, strongly connected with the role of women in his society, the parental disapproval of the one the lover has chosen (in The Merchant of Venice this disapproval is more of an imposing will, and Portia has to marry the one her dead father has chosen for her, while in The Taming of the Shrew, Kate has to marry Petrucchio by force because her father fears no one else will woo her).

Many critics have claimed that Shakespeare sides with his young women, but in the end he marries them to husbands whose superior power is assumed. Nonetheless, to arrive to this desired moment, that of marriage, these women will have to disguise themselves as men in order to acquire recognition for their intellect (which is rather ironic, for they never really acquire recognition as women). It is a remarkable feature of Shakespeare’s comedies his prominence given to women. It may almost be said that whereas men dominate the tragedies and die, it is women who dominate the comedies and live. They take control of the events, they seem to possess not only greater intuitive awareness then men, but also more common sense and emotional maturity.

Given the fact that in Elizabethan theatre the female parts were played by young boys, there is no surprise at the frequency with which these actors played the part of a woman disguised as a young man. It has been often said that Shakespeare employed this technique to confuse his audience even more (audience who saw a young man who played the part of a woman who disguised herself as a man). But the employment of young men that played women’s parts also served Shakespeare; for he was able to put words into a woman’s mouth without them sounding outrageous as they would have is really uttered by a woman.

Women disguising themselves as men and deceiving men is thus a recurring element in Shakespeare’s comedies. These women manipulate other character through their superior knowledge and their stratagems are indispensable for the dramatic structure, generating both complications and resolutions. Portia in The Merchant of Venice disguises herself as a lawyer and manages to find a flaw in the Venetian law to save Antonio. Rosalind in As You Like It is also the young Ganymede who helps Orlando “grow up”.

Of course, not all of the comedies act in this way, not all of Shakespeare’s heroines are “women on top”, but he manages to create comic mode by temporarily placing servants over masters (as with Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew), women over men, this way dislocating the hierarchies sanctioned by society. It is but another form of chaos which is reestablished to order at the end. The comic heroine, whether disguised as a man or not, acts on her behalf and also as the agent of authority which was frequently gendered as masculine.

This might seem a trick of the comedy, but it was not really such, given the fact that at that time it was a woman, Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled a man’s world. Shakespeare’s comic heroines become socially androgynous, just like the Queen. This androgyny comes not only from their embodiment as boys-actors on the stage, but also from their speech, from their language. All dramatic characters are made of words, but the comic heroines assume masculinity to control the language.

Chapter six

Irony and confusion

Language is extremely important in comedies, and fun to play with. Shakespeare knew this very well and puns are one of his favorite methods of entertaining. Samuel Johnson identified the pun as “Shakespeare’s fatal Cleopatra”, noting that he was “content to lose the world for the sake of a good, or even a bad, play on words”¹³. Puns used in comedies complicate and split the language, make it fertile. A pun pushes more meanings into a word, meanings that the word cannot hold, and it always, always finds sex.

Playing with words means sometimes Shakespeare gives double meaning to his words, and he does this using irony. The word “irony” is used in expressions or actions in which there are at least two levels of meaning, the evident, superficial one and a second entailed signification which may be different to the first. The second meaning, in other words, blunts the first or modifies it. In some cases, the second meaning may entirely contradict the first, when that happens and both speaker and listener are aware of the second meaning contradicting the first, we have what we call “sarcasm”, a strong and obvious irony.

We can see a great example of irony in the comedy “The Taming of the Shrew”. There are two sisters at the play: Katherine is viewed as a shrew and Bianca is viewed as the angelic younger of the two. However, as the play proceeds, we begin to see the true sides of the two sisters and their roles totally turn around. At the end of the play, we find
out that Katherine´s negative attitude becomes a positive one. Ironically Bianca is more of a shrew than her sister. It appears at the Act 5, scene II;

Katherine:
”Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.”
”Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.”

In a more general sense, irony can also mean ambiguity and an ironical expression is one in which we cannot be sure precisely what is meant because there is a range of possible meanings.

The most common type of irony is called “dramatic irony” and it takes place through an uneven distribution of knowledge. Often, the audience or the readers know more about what is going on in the play than the characters themselves. Therefore, when a character says something, his/her discourse will often have two levels of meaning: what the character thinks it means or intends to say and what the audience, with a fuller understanding of the entire situation, understands it to mean. This causes a situation of confusion which intends to be funny for the audience, because the audience knows everything, while the characters of the story only know a part of the truth.

The Irony creates suspense and tension. In “The Comedy of Errors”, the audience is aware very early in the play that the Antipholus of Syracuse is being mistaken for his long-lost twin brother. If the audience was not aware of the presence of the twin brothers, the play would not be as funny.

Confusion

Confusion is a key tool that Shakespeare uses to create comic situations. Much of the comic confusion will embroil a series of misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and so on, the confusion generally arising from an incomplete or uneven distribution of knowledge. The use of confusion by Shakespeare is more than obvious in many of his works, especially in Comedy of Errors, where confusion is force of the main plot and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where once again the confusion between the lovers and their identities is the substance of the plot.

During CoE the constructed confusion is obvious when considering that the characters in the play are two sets of twins, each of which are not only identical but called the same names i.e. two twins each named Antipholus and two twins each named Dromio. An example of the confusion in this play can be seen when at one time Antipholus of Syracuse sends his Dromio away, and when Dromio of Ephesus comes back, he is addressed by Antipholus as if he was his Dromio:

Antipholus of Syracuse: “Here comes the almanac of my true date.

What now? How chance thou art return’d so soon?”

Dromio of Ephesus: “Return’d so soon! Rather approach’d too late.”¹⁴

The confusion in this scene goes on without any of the characters knowing they are addressing the wrong person. We can see in this scene we can find a clear example of a play with words, used to provoke confusion. Antipholus asks for a certain amount of money, whereas Dromio, who does not know what of what he is asked, understands “mark” as “scar”:

Antipholus of Syracuse: “Where is the thousand marks thou hadst of me?”

Dromio of Ephesus: “I have some marks of yours upon my pate,

Some of my mistress’ marks upon my shoulders,

But not a thousand marks between you both.

If I should pay your worship those again,

Perchance you will not bear them patiently.”¹⁵

But the confusing comic situations do not stop with the dialogue between the two Antipholi and their servants, the confusion involves almost ever character in the play, drawing them all into the confusing knot which Shakespeare slowly creates. Another example can be seen in the wooing scene with Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse, the Luciana is confused by Antipholus of Syracuse´s love declaration, thinking him to be her sister’s husband. The “linguistic duel” that follows is almost too much for the audience who although confused themselves, are more knowledgeable than the characters. On one hand we have the unmarried girl who is trying to protect her sister’s honor, as well as her own; confused and shocked by the outrageous propositions her supposed brother-in-law makes her. On the other hand we are presented with the pathetic, melancholic man who believes he has encountered his “fair sun”, but who is unwilling to pay attention to what the poor girl is saying, nor ask why she calls herself his sister, although he clearly states that he has no wife, at least as far as he knows:

Luciana: “What, are you mad, that you do reason so?”

Antipholus of Syracuse: “Not mad, but mated; how, I do not know.”

Luciana: “It is a fault that springeth from your eye.”

Antipholus of Syracuse: “For gazing on your beams, fair sun, being by.”

Luciana: “Gaze where you should, and that will clear your sight.”

Antipholus of Syracuse: “As good to wink, sweet love, as look on night.”

Luciana: “Why call you me love? Call my sister so.”

Antipholus of Syracuse: “Thy sister’s sister.”

Luciana: “That’s my sister.”

Confusion is shown in the character of Antipholus of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors in the following way: Antipholus of Ephesus is a wealthy and well respected merchant in Ephesus. We find out in the play that he has a comfortable home, business associates who respect him, and a wife. All these become threatened due to his brother´s arrival[1], Antipholus of Ephesus always loses with the confusions: he arrives for supper with two guests to find that he is locked out and his wife is at home with another man, (in reality, Adriana does not know her real husband is outside, being with Antipholus of Syracuse she thinks she is dining with her husband), he is accused of not paying a necklace he has not even received (in fact it was given to Antipholus of Syracuse) and he is put under arrest for it, moreover, his servant Dromio fails continually to achieve what he has been asked to do in order to solve the situations because Antipholus gives the orders to the wrong Dromio, and later his own wife blames him for all the chaos created by insisting in that he has become possessed and wants him to be exorcised. Confusion brought chaos to Antipholus of Ephesus´s life.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ambiguity and mistaken identity are a source of the main confusion, Robin Goodfellow casts the spell on the wrong person (Lysander instead of Demetrius), based on the description he is given (“Thou shalt know the man / By the Athenian garments he hath on”). When Hermia wakes up, after having a rest in the forest, she sees that Lysander is not there. Then she observes that he is wooing Helena, she is very confused, because at the beginning she thinks that he is cheating, but later he rejects her. So, she does not know if he loves her or if he loves Helena or if he is cheating her. This causes a chain of events which are meant to confuse the audience, whilst making them laugh at the comic consequences of the mistake. Though many a confusing plot it becomes obvious that Shakespeare is more concerned with laughter than with accuracy or reality within a situation, however though these situations, as light hearted as they may seem, there are always hidden messages and complexity.14.

We can see another example of confusion in the play “The Taming of the Shrew”. It takes place in the Act 5, Scene II; everyone ends up married; Lucentio to Bianca and Hortensio to a rich widow. During the banquet, Petruchio brags that his wife is now completely obedient. Baptista, Hortensio, and Lucentio are incredulous and the latter two believe that their wives are more obedient. Petruchio proposes that each one will send a servant to call for their wives and they will observe which wife is the most obedient. Finally, Bianca and the widow don´t respond to the call and Kate responds to her husband.

Chapter seven

Fools and clowns

The final reoccurring pattern we can see in Shakespeare’s comedies is the presence of fools and clowns. These characters have contributed to the greatness of Shakespearian comedy. Usually they are considered as humorous characters, created with the aim of making people laugh. At first glance we see these characters simply creating comic relief by being as silly as possible, but in reality they are more complex than it first seems. Fools are observant, intelligent and have more depth to their presence than simply providing jokes. However in order to see this, we, as spectators and as readers, we have to make an effort. Shakespeare used these characters in a versatile manner. He used them not only for humour but to provide insights into the progress of the play (Greenblatt, Cohen & Eisaman, (1997). The character Bottom in MND, and many other Shakespearian fools, are used to contrast the behaviour of the other characters in the plays and to make important points that Shakespeare wishes his audience to understand. (Mooney, 1998)

The fools and the clowns guide us through the play; they act as commentators on the behavior of the main characters, and always tell the truth, although they are hardly ever believed by the other characters. We can clearly see this exemplified in the character Bottom, one of the fools present in MND, in this play the role of the fool is particularly important as the tagline of a midsummer nights dream, (at least in the movie) is ‘Love makes fools of us all.’ This makes the fools role even more important in this play, we can see Bottom being used as a comparative figure. In the play the focus is on love and from an outer audience perspective we can see that the situations the main characters end up, and their actions are foolish as a consequence of love. The actions and words of the foolish characters within the play MND such as Puck and Bottom are vital as they are used to contrast the foolish actions of the main characters. Fools and clowns are essential to Shakespearian comedies thanks to their humanity, although at first impression we have of them is that of them being in the comedy only to entertain the audience or the readers. Fools and clowns have a high contribution in the play, mainly in producing humor and confusion. One clear example of this can be Twelfth Night, where Feste takes control of the comedy and its humor and also guide us through the play.

But probably the most important role of the fool and the clown in Shakespeare’s comedies is that of acting as a mask for the author to criticize aspects of the English society, because fools and clown are licensed to speak out where others must be silent, they are licensed to tell the rude truth, and become thus more influential than many other characters. This trait is evident in Bottom, he has many key phrases in the play MND, many of which can be seen as multilayered. It is possible that the observational comments of Bottom, which, in the time of Shakespeare, may have been somewhat controversial, are purposely said by a fool in order to disguise their significance. This is a very clever trick because through this, without people realising, Shakespeare is making points about society which after the play will remain in people’s heads without them necessarily knowing why.

Fools and clowns provide a contrast between themselves and the other characters of the play. Shakespeare is implicitly comparing each of us with the characters of his plays. We are, as they are, running through our lives blustering, feeling that we are in full control of our circumstances, whereas in reality, life confuses us, upsets us and makes us feel impotent and angry. Through fools and clowns Shakespeare is showing as that we are not so distinct from these foolish characters.

We can distinguish between those fools who are intelligent and clever, like Feste in Twelfth Night, requiring some mental effort on our part to appreciate their intelligence and humor; and those fools that make us laugh because they are deliberately acting simple, in order to entertain, not needing clever wit to be funny. Clever fools are capable of developing deeper human traits, whereas foolish fools often serve to contrast the dark moments of a play with a lighter feel, as Dogberry does in Much Ado about Nothing, when he contrasts the darkness brought to the play by Don John.

Fools and clowns love language, and make use of it, but their words, as well as their actions are ridiculous. The use of language to make the personality of a fool is evident in the character Bottom in MND, he is made funny through his constant mixing up of words and sentences, despite his strong self confidence in his abilities. His problems with pronunciation occur all the way through, these problems show Bottom to be simple but not stupid. His problems in pronunciation give less credibility to the words which he says and therefore has more scope to comment on society, without repercussions. The appearance of the fool’s scene usually occurs just as the shock or trauma level of the play has reached a point when the minds of the audience members begin to become desensitized. These scenes give spectators a chance to catch their breath and mentally prepare for what follows next. The closer you look at the role of a fool, the more defined and clever it becomes, those who can not see the cleverness of the fool, are a fool themselves.

Antipholus of Ephesus´s eternal companion is his slave Dromio of Ephesus. Dromio contributes to entangle Antipholus into muddled up situations and makes funny commentaries on his master´s anger and loss of temper.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the elements that make a comedy from a Shakespearian play are many and varied. Firstly, a comedy cannot be called that without a happy ending. Although humor and humorous language may miss from a comedy, the happy ending is a prerequisite to it. This happy ending may mean a marriage or the promise of a marriage, marriage to which the characters arrive after overcoming obstacles, such as parental disapproval. Wooing is also an important element of Shakespearian comedies, it is a prerequisite of marriage and helps develop comic characters.

Man-like women are also something very common in Shakespearian comedies. Women disguise themselves as men to achieve social recognition and this may lead to complications, as well as to resolutions in the plot. It also helps create comical atmosphere.

Moreover, in one chapter of the paper, we have seen a very important group of characters that appears in Shakespearian plays, namely, fools and clowns, important because they are the author’s voice when he wants to criticize aspects of the society he lives in.

As we have seen throughout the paper, these elements are peculiar and very important to Shakespearian comedies. They make them unique and a very important part of the history of literature.

Endnotes

¹ Graves, Robert. “Sayings of the Week”. The Observer. 6 Dec. 1964

² For further reading about Shakespeare’s life see Wells, Stanley & Gary Taylor. The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), page xv-xx

³ Wells, Stanley & Lena Cowen Orlin. Shakespeare. An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), page 167

⁴“Comedy”. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 27 Oct. 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy>

⁵ Carroll, William. “Romantic Comedies” in Shakespeare. An Oxford Guide ed Stanley Wells & Lena Cowen Orlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), page 176

⁶ McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), page 81

⁷ McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), page 83

⁸ Shakespeare, William. The comedy of Errors in The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. ed Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), page 289

⁹ “Woo” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 27 Oct. 2006. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=woo

¹⁰ Draper, R.P. Shakespeare. The Comedies (London: Macmillan, 2000), page 71

¹¹ Draper, R.P. Shakespeare. The Comedies (London: Macmillan, 2000), page 56

¹² McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), page 84

¹³ Danson, Lawrence. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), page 77

¹⁴ Shakespeare, William. The comedy of Errors in The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. ed Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), page 288

¹⁵ Shakespeare, William. The comedy of Errors in The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. ed Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pages 288-289

¹⁶ Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. ed Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pages 421

[1] www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/errors/