Secretarial
team
Maria
Clement Quesada
Víctor Colon
García
Rita Costell
Chueca
Dana Cristea
Karla Díaz
de Heredia García
Begoña
Espert Sánchez
Aroa Lara
Fayos Julia
Maria Carmen
Ferrando Oñate
Juan Enrique
Tortajada Gimeno
Claire
Louise Young
Dr. Vicente Forés López
Curso
monográfico de literatura inglesa: “Shakespeare through performance”
December
19th, 2006
Recurrent Patterns in Shakespearian Comedies
Index
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………4
Chapter
one…………………………………………………………………………….6
General
considerations on William Shakespeare and his comedies
Chapter
two...................................................................................................................10
Happy
ending
Chapter
three…………………………………………………………………………..16
Marriage
Chapter
four…………………………………………………………………………...20
Wooing
Chapter
five……………………………………………………………………………25
Women
dressing as men
Chapter
six……………………………………………………………………………..27
Irony
and confusion
Chapter
seven………………………………………………………………………….34
Fools
and clowns
Conclusion
…………………………………………………………………………….37
Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………..38
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………40
Introduction
The present paper is but a revision of a previous one
that was handed in on November 7th, 2006 and presented to our 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 our second paper on the same
subject is although the first one was simple and we think understandable, we
felt that the first paper was handed in incomplete or lacking something. If we
were to use excuses we could say this happened because the time we were given
for its writing, too short, and the organization our group organization lacking
and chaotic. Due to the first paper being somewhat of a first draft, 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.
In the first paper we decided to begin with a first
draft, and the person in charge of doing that was Dana Cristea. The paper was
then 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 set for us. They were also set 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, as well as
overseeing the final presentation. 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 28th,
2006.
Having explained our complicated methodology, we now
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 which
are constantly being repeated in the comedies and 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.
The chapter pays homage to the genius of William Shakespeare, and we felt it
necessary 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, has a secular imaginative writer had such success and
awakened 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 ever since. His genius is
to be found in the freshness of his verse, and his capacity to please theatre
goers today, as he has done for the past four hundred years. 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 as interesting today as they
were at the time he wrote them. Every representation of his work 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 we see these works, because each time we think about the genius
behind the wonders we are beholding, we reinvent Shakespeare. We always draw
the same conclusion, that he is really 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. This, however, is not the object of this essay. What we are interested
in is Shakespeare’s literary production, which has been shown through the years
to be the best and most important in the history of literature.
Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays, a sequence of
154 sonnets, two long narrative poems and various short poems. Nothing,
however, is as easy as it seems with anything concerning Shakespeare. Even
these simple numbers become complicated when we take into consideration that at
least two of the plays were co-authored with fellow playwright John Fletcher.
Other plays were attributed to Shakespeare that were lost through the passage
of time. Shakespeare also wrote passages for other writers work and we do not
have an accurate catalogue of his shorter poetry.3 Verifying the
authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays is not our purpose. The purpose of this
essay goes further than a simple sum of his comedies, tragedies and histories.
Our main interest and theme of this work, as we have
stated 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 style or if they are individual styles changing between
comedies. Before we get to that, let us look at what we understand by the term
comedy.
The classical meaning of Comedy is derived from comical
theatre but the popular definition is ‘the use of humor with an intent to
provoke laughter in general.’ In theatre, the origins of comedy stem from
ancient Greece. Whereas tragedy is a genre which is characterized by a serious
fall from grace of one protagonist who has a high social standing. Comedy, on
the other hand 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 is subjective, whereas one may or may not find
something humorous because it is either too offensive or too weak and therefore
the right balance must be found. Comedy is judged by the audience according to
their own taste. Some enjoy a cerebral fare such 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 the epic.
This hierarchy was due to the fact that many writers followed Aristotle’s Poetics,
which focused on tragedy, so therefore no theory of comedy existed. A common
definition of comedy in that time was given by George Whetstone in the prologue
to Promos and Cassandra (1578) and 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. He introduced comic
elements into tragedies and also after 1600, tragic elements into comedies.
Therefore if we know that comedies have tragic
elements and tragedies, comic elements 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,
a celebration and 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. However,
comedy must always end happily, a happy ending involves a 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 and 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 slapstick as in ‘a pie 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 ordered and safe, and for
that reason we laugh. We laugh at the world because we know it will end the
chaos. Although the 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.
Although a happy ending is a prerequisite to a comedy,
not all are the same, Shakespeare chose to create some endings “happier” than
others. There are also 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 an unappealing man, who
repeatedly declared he does not want her. It is interesting to note that
chronologically, the endings written by Shakespeare in his comedies, reveal an
increasing emphasis on satirical or melancholic elements which complicate and
disturb the serenity of the happy ending. However the pattern of a happy ending
does exist, and we can see it present in all of Shakespeare’s comedies.
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 in the future as this is not explicitly stated. 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 due to the recurrent design of 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, in a ‘happy
ending,’ the stories plot is built on the fact that a family has been broken,
setting 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, wondering why all his peaceful existence
abruptly changes into unbearable confusion (discussed later on). So when at the
end of the play the family is reunited and composure has been reestablished, we
have a typical happy ending, where all is once again clear and every body is
happy.
As in the previously stated comedies, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream also has 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. Lysander shows his love once again for Hermia and Demetrius also
shows his love for 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. Once again we can see a marriage as a facilitator of the happy ending.
Within this topic, the
conclusions Rita Costell has developed are that a happy ending is one of the
main features of Shakespearian comedy. This pattern embodies the restoration of
stated rules, the organisation of chaos and the establishment of a gracious
final relief.
Although punctual suffering and frustrating
situations are commonly seen in comedies, we all know when watching a comedy
that this will not remain, that a happy ending will arrive to rearrange all the
quid pro quo, the misunderstandings
and the false identities. This is accurately expressed in the last two lines of
A Midsummer night´s dream in the sum up of Puck´s final speech to the
audience.
“Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.”
This sort of inverted captatio benevolentia works because the
balance has been restored, therefore we are able to forgive his constant
alterations of harmony. Although harmony was far from being total before he
started his tricks; we must bear in mind the beginning of the play, the two
unhappy characters -Helena and Demetrius who were in two mixed couples, and
Hermia´s feelings which were not welcomed by her stuborn father. The mixed up plot exists not only due to the
fairies interventions but also due to the misfortune of human emotional
leanings.
In most of his comedies, Shakespeare allows
us to breath in a deep sigh of relief as the end approaches. Where the end
scene will see in one giddy rhythm, all the misunderstandings between the
characters being forgotten and all the personalities returning to their
original nature.
In A Midsummer night´s dream, Bottom
is no longer an ass and in The comedy of errors, Antipholus of Ephesus
social status is reassured. The pariahs are nothing else but pariahs and the
lords remain lords. So, what happens to Sly in The taming of the shrew?
Where has he gone? We wonder how he does feel after the lord´s joke finishes.
But Shakespeare never seeks for a quick moral: Sly seems to represent an excuse
to recover all the play with the untouchable veil of dreams.
And so does the author from the first words
of A midsummer night´s dream up to the last.
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber´d here
While these visions did appear.” (Puck. Act V. Last lines)
The end of the play is the awakening from a
hilarious and funny dream for the audience, but from a painful and frustrating
nightmare for the characters. More precisely, in Titania´s case we face a
humiliating episode where the beauteous queen of the Fairies falls in love with
a donkey.
“My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamour´d of an ass.” (Titania, Act IV. Scene 1)
The audience receives two confronted
messages: on the one hand, we all can be loved by the most gracious creature in
the world; on the other hand, we must be aware of how stupid our natural
leanings are. We all are susceptible of falling madly in love with an ass, even
if his ears are normal and he doesn´t bray.
However, in this same play, Shakespeare not
only shields himself with the dream as a subpattern in the happy endings, he
also makes use of the play inside the play whose performance follows the plot
end in itself. Once everything has returned into calm, all the real world
characters sit down together to see a play performed by an ass. This is quite a
perturbing idea, and funny too. Moreover, we do not think that the choice of
Pyramus and Thisbe´s story is for free; this concept of the couple of suicidal
lovers should sound familiar to the author and to the audience as well. How
interesting to discover Shakespeare mocking at such a serious topic, that he
himself had developed.
Aside from these levels of analyse, we must
take into account the fact that apart form the dream and the play inside the
play, A midsummer night´s dream finishes with the speech of an unreal
world character. As if the two precedent guises were not enough, we assist to a
real play closed by a fairyland inhabitant. Shakespeare intensively insists on
the unreal nature of his play, maybe to ask for an exemption of guilt after
showing how a queen can fall in love with a donkey, and how a daughter can
marry whoever she likes.
At the end of this play, the four different
groups of characters –the theatre group, the couples and Hermia´s father,
Theseus and Hippolyta, and the fairyland characters- join together in peace. We
suppose they will never mix up again.
The happy ending in The comedy of errors
is far more familiar.
“The Duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you, calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossip´s feast, and go with me.
After so long grief, such nativity.” (Abbess. Act V. Scene 1.
Lines 404-407)
The trouble of mixed identities lies in the
middle of one same family, and the last anagnorisi reveal the real identities
of the characters not to the audience, who knows them from the beginning, but
the relationships between the characters to the characters themselves who,
sincerely, are not very bright.
In fact, the length of the plot is possible
thanks to the ingenuity of Antipholus of Syracuse who, instead of thinking that
there should be a reasonable explanation for all these strange good manners in
the Ephesus inhabitants, prefers not to think at all and believes that he has
arrived at a city of wizards and magicians. But what could we expect from the
son of a man who has twins and puts the same name to both his sons? Same
aspect, same name: these seem the perfect ingredients for a nice
misunderstanding. We suppose this is one of the elements that introduced the
idea of farce when dealing with the categorization of The comedy of Errors.
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 with 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, instead of accepting the impossibility of their love, Lysander convinces
Hermia to run away:
If thou lovest me then,
Steal forth thy father's house tomorrow night.
165 And in the wood, a league without the town—
Where I did meet thee once with Helena
To do observance to a morn of May—
There will I stay for thee.
Act I, Scene i, lines 163-168
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.
This
is Rita Costell´s contribution to the recurrent pattern of marriage.To arrive
at these unavoidable happy endings, a marriage or even multiple marriages must
take place. In A midsummer night´s dream, Theseus chooses to share his
happiness and welfare inviting the two young couples –Hermia and Lysander,
Helena and Demetrius- to get married at the same time. One single ceremony will
get together three happy couples: Shakespeare kills three birds in just one shot.
“For in the temple by and by with us
These
couples shall eternally be knit.” (Theseus. Act IV. Scene 1)
Marriage is conceived as the perfect
expression of social balance, a confined space in which real expectations are
updated. A woman and a man find their public identity and their social utility
through marriage, and a non-married person does not correspond to an acceptable
social pattern, if not belonging to a clerical order.
We can observe how marriage is so important in the play,
due to the fact that all the characters are joined in a marriage, and the play
is going to finish with the mentioned celebration.
Marriage, consequently, is mostly shown as
the last consecution of love or social commitment and normally appears at the
end of the plays to symbolize the
perfect agreement of all parts. That is the case for the couples in A
midsummer night´s dream and also for Antipholus of Syracuse, who discovers
his love towards Luciana, who discovers her acceptance to Antipholus love.
“And this fair gentlewoman, her sister here,
Did call me brother. (To Luciana) What I told you then
I hope I shall have leisure to make good,
If this be not a dream I see and hear.”
(Antipholus of Syracuse.
Act V.Scene
1. Lines 375- 378)
Nevertheless, the marriage is not always a
final resource in Shakespeare´s plays. The marriage of Antipholus of Ephesus
and Adriana lacks from happiness and satisfactions. Adriana is jealous of the
courtesan who stops her husband from having dinner at time. On the other side,
Antipholus seems to be quite bored of
his wife. All through the action, and unconsciously, Adriana will perpetrate
her unspoken desire for revenge on her husband thanks to the mistaken identity
with his twin brother.
“Were not my doors locked up, and I shut up?”
“And did not she herself revile me there?”
“Did not her kitchen-maid rail, taunt, and scorn me?”
(Antipholus of Ephesus.
Act IV. Scene4.
Lines 68, 70, 72)
Adriana carries out all the actions that
she would never have dared to achieve if it was not by mistake. In fact, the
women who really understand and enjoy
these facts as a subtle revenge are those in the audience, who really know that
Antipholus of Ephesus is being left outside and that his chair besides his
woman is being occupied by his brother.
Another unusual marriage that does not take
place at the end of the play is the one between Katharina and Petruchio in The
Taming of the Shrew. Undoubtedly, the holy union of these characters is far
from being a conventional one. In their case, the traditional order of marriage
and wooing has been inverted. The first thing they do is getting married in a
rush due to the urgency of Petruchio in getting Kate´s dowry. No love, no
romance appear before the ceremony that Kate doesn´t accept but mournfully.
Basically, she has no other choice.
“And to conclude, we have ´greed so well together,
That upon Sunday is the wedding-day.”
(Petruchio.
Act II. Scene 2)
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. In Midsummer
Night’s Dream Lysander tries to sleep
with Hermia, but she refuses. After being turned down he declares his love for
her.
One turf shall serve as pillow for us both.
One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth.
Act II ,Scene ii, lines 30-1
O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence.
35 Love takes the meaning in love's conference.
I mean that my heart unto yours is knit
So that but one heart we can make of it.
Two bosoms interchainèd with an oath—
So then two bosoms and a single troth.
40 Then by your side no bed room me deny.
For, lying so, Hermia, I do not lie.
Act II, Scene ii, lines 34-41
Hermia refuses to sleep in the same bed as Lysander for they have not
married yet. Lysander, in such an ironic way for us the readers declares his
love for her:
Amen to that. I hope my life ends before my loyalty to you does.
I'll sleep over here. Sleep well!
Amen, amen to that fair prayer, say I.
And then end life when I end loyalty!
Here is my bed. Sleep give thee all his rest!
Act II, Scene ii, lines 51-4
Not only does Lysander try to seduce Hermia, but
because he is under the spell he falls in love with the first person he sees,
in this case Helena:
Not Hermia but Helena I love.
Who will not change a raven for a dove?
The will of man is by his reason swayed,
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
Act II, Scene ii, lines 86-9
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.
Another example of
wooing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
is the couple of Hippolyta and Theseus. We know that their love story is the
main plot of the play, because due to their next marriage all the characters
are joined in the comedy. We also know that Theseus won the Hippolyta’s love in
a battle, but he has won Hippolyta’s heart through wooing. He’s able to do everything
for his lover, and he’s delighted on pleasing her.
After
having done the individual essay on this character, we can say poor Kate in The
taming of the shrew: not even her post-marriage wooing sessions are
conventional. These are precisely a taming process more than a traditional
wooing. Her sister Bianca, opposedly, receives a conventional wooing with
Lucentio´s love poems disguised as latin lessons.
“Now, mistress, profit you in what you read?”
(Lucentio. Act IV. Scene
2)
Luciana in The comedy of errors
receives her wooing scene as well through the Antipholus she believes to be her
brother-in-law. This is a critical situation for her and the difference between
the wooing tone of the man and her astonishment and offence build a magnificent
moment of comicity.
“Why call you me love? Call me sister so.”
“Thy sister´s sister.”
“That´s my sister.”
“No, it is thyself, mine own self´s better part,
Mine eye´s clear eye, my dear heart´s dearer heart…
(Luciana and Antipholus of
Syracuse. Act III. Scene 2. Lines 58-62)
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.
Hermia
refuses to sleep in the same bed as Lysander for they have not married yet.
Lysander, in such an ironic way for us the readers who know what is going to
happen next declares his love for her:
Amen to
that. I hope my life ends before my loyalty to you does.
I'll sleep
over here. Sleep well!
Amen, amen
to that fair prayer, say I.
And then end
life when I end loyalty!
Here is my
bed. Sleep give thee all his rest!
Act II, Scene ii, lines 51-4
When
Hermia wakes up only to discover that her beloved Lysander is gone, and that he
is vowing Helena, she gets mad and tries to have Lysander back, but he openly
says that he no longer has feelings for her:
Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent.
Act III, scene ii, lines 266-7
Thy love? Out, tawny Tartar, out!
270 Out, loathèd medicine! O hated potion, hence!
'Tis no jest That I do hate thee and love Helena.
Act III, scene ii, 285-8
This
situation could be seen as an ironic one if we compare the fact that at this
point we have the two men in love with Helena, whereas at the beginning of the
play we had the two male characters willing to marry Hermia.
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): “Who talks within there? ho, open the door!” he is accused of not paying a necklace he has not even received (in
fact it was given to Antipholus of Syracuse): “I owe you none till I receive the chain…. You
gave me none: you wrong me much to say so” 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:
“Were not my doors
lock'd up and I shut out?.. And did not she herself revile me there?...Did not
her kitchen-maid rail, taunt, and scorn me?... Thou hast suborn'd the goldsmith
to arrest me”
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
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