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.