Secretarial team
Maria
Clement Quesada
Víctor Colon
García
Rita Costell
Chueca
Dana Cristea
Karla
Díaz de Heredia García
Begoña
Espert Sánchez
Maria Carmen
Ferrando Oñate
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……………………………………………………………………………3
Chapter one…………………………………………………………………………….6
General considerations on William Shakespeare and his comedies
Chapter
two...................................................................................................................10
Happy ending
Chapter three…………………………………………………………………………..17
Marriage
Chapter four…………………………………………………………………………...21
Wooing
Chapter five……………………………………………………………………………26
Women dressing as men
Chapter six……………………………………………………………………………..29
Irony and confusion
Chapter seven………………………………………………………………………….36
Fools and clowns
Conclusion
……………………………………………………………………………..37
Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………..40Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………44
Introduction
The present paper is but
a revision of a previous one that was handed in on November 7th,
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 person who did not contribute with information in the first
paper, that is Rita Costell Chueca will find the recurring patterns in The Taming of the Shrew, a task that our
professor recommended us to do. 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. Begoña Espert Sánchez 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.
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 as well as 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
pattern, 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
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”
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 Quesada 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, that is, 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.
In The Comedy of Errors we can also see the Second Merchant contributing to create this happy
ending, because at the end of the play the problem has been resolved with the help of the Merchant and Angelo. It
is necessary to relate the appearance of the second merchant with Angelo,
because the figure or the appearance of Angelo is the situation makes possible
or creates the character of the merchant.
As in the other comedies, in A 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
Dealing
with this topic, these are the conclusions Rita Costell Chueca has developed. A
happy ending is the main feature of Shakespearian comedy, the pattern which
embodies the restoration of stated rules, the organisation of chaos and the
establishment of a gracious final relief.
Although
punctual suffering and enervating situations are commonly exposed in comedies,
we all accept the deal that a happy ending is soon arriving to rearrange all
the quid pro quo, the misunderstandings and the false identities. The two last
lines of A Midsummer Night´s Dream,
lump together the sum up of Puck´s final
speech to the audience: “Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin
shall restore amends.”9
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
remember that we found two unhappy characters, Helena and Demetrius, in two
mixed couples and that Hermia’s feelings were not supported by the stubbornness
of her father. Definitely, the plot exists not due to the fairies interventions
but because of the misfortune of human emotional leanings. It is curious that
these problematic natural inclinations are solved by the magic powers of a
flower.
In most of his comedies, Shakespeare allows
us to breath in deep relief as the end approaches. In only one giddy rhythm
scene, all the misunderstandings between the characters are forgotten, and all
the personalities return to their original nature.
In A
Midsummer Night´s Dream, Bottom is no longer and ass (or is he?) 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.”10
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.”11
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 does not 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.”12
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 A 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
Shakespearian 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.
And in the wood, a
league without the town—
Where I did meet thee
once with
To do observance to a
morn of May—
There will I stay for
thee.”13
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.”14
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.”15
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?”16
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 does not 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.”17
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”18)
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.19 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.20 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 A 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.”21
and then continues:
“O, take the sense,
sweet, of my innocence.
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.
Then by your side no bed
room me deny.
For, lying so, Hermia, I do not lie.”22
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, 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!”23
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
“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.”24
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
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 A 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
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 is able to do everything for his lover, and he is delighted with pleasing
her.
After having done the individual essay on
this character, Rita Costell Chueca has reached the conclusion that for 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?”25
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.
Luciana:
“Why call you me love? Call me sister so.”
Antipholus
of Syracuse: “Thy sister’s sister.”
Luciana: “That’s my sister.”
Antipholus
of Syracuse: “No, it is thyself, mine own self´s better part,
Mine
eye’s clear eye, my dear heart’s dearer heart…”26
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 marriage27. 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
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”28. 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:
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.”29
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.
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, 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!”30
When Hermia wakes up only to discover that her beloved Lysander is
gone, and that he is vowing
“Hang off, thou cat,
thou burr! Vile thing, let loose
Or I will shake thee
from me like a serpent.”31
and goes on hurting her:
“Thy love? Out, tawny
Tartar, out!
Out, loathèd medicine! O
hated potion, hence!
'Tis no
jest. That I do hate thee and love
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
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 The 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 The Comedy of Errors 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,
that is, 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
What now? How chance
thou art return’d so soon?”
Dromio of
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
Dromio of
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.”34
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.”35
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
The second merchant is
created to add even more confusion to this already complicated plot. In someway
we could say that the second merchant contributes to the title of the play,
because The Comedy of Errors is a
description of what is happening during the play, which is a circumstance of
confusion, and of errors. The play is a chain of errors, which in some
occasions are created or originated by the Merchant, in an indirect way,
because when he did it he was not conscious what will happen later.
In conclusion we can say that Second Merchant
has a short appearance but an important one because he contributes to creating
what we understand as a comedy: from order to disorder and to create a happy
ending where the problems are resolved.
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”36).
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
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. 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.
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, the fool of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, where his role is particularly important as the tagline of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (at least in the movie): “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 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, characters
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 clowns 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 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 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 Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where 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.
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
3 Wells, Stanley & Lena Cowen Orlin. Shakespeare.
An
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
6 McDonald, Russ. The
7 McDonald, Russ. The
8 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors in The
9 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (V, ii, 67-68) in The
10 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (V, ii, 53-57) in The
11 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (IV, i, 74-75) in The
12 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (V, i, 404-407) in The
13 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (I, i, 163-168) in The
14 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (IV, i, 179-180) in The
15 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (V, i, 375-379) in The
16 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (IV, iv, 71, 73, 75) in The
17 Shakespeare, William. The Taming of
the Shrew (II, i, 292-293) in The
18 “Woo” Merriam-Webster Online
Dictionary. 27 Oct. 2006. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=woo
19 Draper, R.P. Shakespeare. The Comedies
(
20 Draper, R.P. Shakespeare. The Comedies
(
21 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, ii, 47-48) in The
22 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, ii, 51-58) in The
23 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, ii, 68-70) in The
24 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, ii, 119-122) in The
25 Shakespeare, William. The Taming of
the Shrew (IV, ii, 6) in The
26 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (III, ii, 57-61) in The
27 McDonald, Russ. The
28 Danson, Lawrence. Shakespeare’s Dramatic
Genres (
29 Shakespeare, William. The Taming of
the Shrew (V, ii, 141-159) in The
30 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, ii, 68-70) in The
31 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (III, ii, 261-262) in The
32 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (III, ii, 264-265) in The
33 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (I, ii, 41-43) in The
34 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (I, ii, 81-86) in The
35 Shakespeare, William. The comedy of
Errors (III, ii, 53-59) in The
36 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (II, i, 263-264) in The
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