Chapter two
As we have said in the previous chapter, humor and
laughter are not prerequisite in Shakespearian comedies, but its main
attraction is laughter that comes from wordplay, intricate plotting and
occasional “pies in the face”. But the “happiness” that we associate with
comedy comes from the fact that we are aware and familiar with the conventions
of drama, with the natural ending of a comedy. We know that nothing bad will
happen to a character because we know that he/she is protected under the
comfortable blanket of comedy and its conventions. We also know that everything
will end up ordered and safe, and for that reason we laugh. We laugh at the
world because we know it will end up ordering the chaos. And although that
order comes only in the last five or ten minutes of the play, the expectation
of it and what occurs before it, the misunderstanding, the confusion, the
foolishness, the evil, are what really make us laugh. In the end we laugh at life
(which in a way becomes the evil character who tries to put down the main
character and to stop him/her from being happy), because the human being is
shown as small and silly, but he/she still manages to be happy
A happy ending is thus
the main feature of Shakespearian comedy, a prerequisite to it, whereas, as we
have said before, humor and laughter are not. In The Comedy of Errors,
Shakespeare dedicates his energy in amplifying the confusion generated by the
two sets of twins. The play is hilarious, but several years later, in an
another twin comedy, Twelfth Night, although the confusion still
provokes laughter, the play fails to be hilarious, due mainly to the fact that
the author complicates the tone of it by exploring the pleasures of romantic
love and offering large doses of melancholy and music. Does that mean that some
comedies are more comic than others? Definitely yes, but it does not mean that
some comedies are “more of a comedy” than others.
As we have said before,
a happy ending is a prerequisite to a comedy, but Shakespeare chose to create
some endings “happier” than others. They are the so-called “problematic
endings”, in which the promised marriage is delayed, or in some way
compromised. It is the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where a messenger
enters amid the jollity of the final scene and announces the death of the
Princess’s father. The wedding is thus postponed for a year, and the main male
character is sent to “exercise his wit among the sick”7. In All’s
Well That Ends Well, the usual marriage is a forced one between a
persistent young woman and a personally unappealing man who repeatedly declared
he does not want her. And the examples could continue, but we must remark that,
chronologically, the endings of Shakespeare’s comedies reveal an increasing
emphasis on satirical or melancholic elements which complicate and disturb the
serenity of the happy ending. But that happy ending does exist, all of
Shakespeare’s comedies have it.
If we consider
individual characters, and making reference to the individual papers of the
members of the Secretarial team, Dana Cristea, in her analysis of the character
Luciana in The Comedy of Errors has noted that although the comedy ends
happily, we have to suppose that Luciana is going to be happy. It must be kept
in mind that a woman’s purpose in life was to get married and bear children,
but Luciana says she “will marry one day, but to try”8, so her main
worry is not getting married. However, we are invited to suppose that she is going
to be happy with the design that Shakespeare, through the voice of Antipholus
of Syracuse, has chosen for her. She utters no word about this future marriage,
but the audience and the reader expects it, because this is the natural ending
for a comedy, and Luciana has to be happy about her marriage. As we shall see
in the next chapter, happy ending meant marriage or the promise of a marriage
for William Shakespeare.
In her analysis of The
Comedy of Errors María Clement 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.