Chapter six
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