Introduction to William Shakespeare’s Comedies: Discussing Number of Key Features

Essence of Shakespearean Comedies: A Deeper Exploration of Key Features

Shakespearean Comedies: Serious Themes Beneath Laughter

The term comedy originally meant merely a play with a happy ending, as distinct from a tragedy with its unhappy ending. The modern definition of comedy is more biased towards laughter, and this can cause some confusion when a student first turns to a Shakespearian comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies are funny, and the make audiences’ laugh, but they do not only do that. They can have very serious elements in their themes and plot, and often concern themselves with some of the weaker aspects of human nature. This explanation is possibly only necessary for those brought up on a diet of filmed television comedy, with maniac laughter from a tape or cassette surfacing every few seconds on the sound track, and comedy taken to mean that at no time must anything serious take place or be mentioned to the audience, unless it is to be instantly deflated or mocked. Good comedy has always had a serious dement in it. The circus clown is felony, but also often a pathetic figure. Someone for whom things never go right and someone for whom life is manually out of control. Much humour derives from potentially serious situations where people demean themselves or make themselves look ridiculous — the man whose trousers fall down in public, or the person who slips on a banana skin are classic examples. Many successful films or television serials a comic nature has been based on situations of desperate seriousness.

The Serious Undertone in Shakespearean Comedy

The British series Steptoe and Son had at its heart an old man unscrupulously hanging on to his son and refusing to let him leave home or have a life independent of his father Shakespeare’s best known comic character (who, incidentally, appears for the most part in the history plays, not the comedies) is obscenely fat, robber, liar, braggart, cheat, diseased, drunk, and totally without moral scruple or any feeling except selfishness. Thus comedy is not merely laughter: in practice all good comedy has had a marked vein of seriousness in it.

Unfolding Shakespearean Comedy's Bittersweet Truths

Shakespeare’s comedies fit this pattern exactly. Just as there are generally held to be four ‘great’ tragedies, so Shakespeare’s comic output is dominated by four plays: Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. Each play is different but each has a number of shared features. Each concentrates o a small section of a specific society, usually the ruling or upper classes of a named country — Illyria in Twelfth Night, England in As You Like It, Thebes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Messina in Much Ado About Nothing. The leading characters are frequently misguided or at fault in some way, but by means of a love affair of’ one sort or another they are allowed to find their way out of their’ weaknesses happily, and with no major ill effects. However, not all the characters are allowed to escape in this manner. There is usually a character in the play who is left outside the ‘magic circle’ of lovers at the end of the play, someone who is unable to change, learn, or be redeemed, and who as a result cannot achieve final and lasting happiness based on self-knowledge and a true knowledge of the world. Thus Orsino in Twelfth Night is not really in love, but merely forcing himself into a belief that he is for his own selfish purposes, but be is allowed to find and marry the right person, Viola, despite his mistake. Malvolio, on the other hand, is too steeped in vanity and self-deception to be brought to his senses, and ends the play shamed, unredeemed, and ruined. The happiness of the other characters at the end of the comedies is given flavour and sharpness by the realization, brought on by characters such as Malvolio, that things do not always end happily. The audience is made to value happiness by being given a taste of unhappiness: not enough to spoil the dish, merely enough to make its flavour welcome.

The Delicate Balance of Tragedy and Comedy

The key to the thematic content of the comedies is self-knowledge. The characters frequently have a false image of themselves, and, as a result, fail totally to see the truth behind other people’s characters. It would need only a slight twist of plot for most of Shakespeare’s comedies to turn into tragedies the heroine dies at the altar after having been falsely accused of unfaithfulness by her fiance—at least this Is what for a moment appears to have happened in Much Ado About Nothing. However, the atmosphere of a comedy is manipulated so that whilst violent or gloomy events stimulate the audience. They never really feel that an unhappy ending is possible or likely. This is the sort of trick that sounds easy when written down in a work of criticism, but which in practice requires a most delicate lancing act from the author. The happiness at the end of a comedy worthless and empty unless it can be shown that misery and unhappiness could really have come about. Enough harshness has to be injected into the play to give it this feeling, to make it credible (few audiences believe in worlds where only good things happen, however much they might want to), and to provide narrative tension and suspense; but if the mixture becomes too strong the comedy will be soured, and the audience will hang awkwardly between two opposed emotions. To an extent this is what happens in the later ‘problem comedies’, where the action seems to be tragic but he ending is happy, and the two elements are never reconciled. The same principle, in reverse, can be applied to the tragedies: the violent and tragic action is relieved by a measure of comedy, but never thought to deflect the play from its main purpose. Just as a somber element in a comedy can highlight and emphasize the comedy, so a comic element in a tragedy (the Fool in King Lear is an example) makes the tragedy richer and more strongly felt.

Varied Humour: Wit and Folly Entwined

Discussion about the serious element in the comedies can tend to obscure the basic fact about them: that they are very funny. Their humour takes many forms. The Fool or Clown parts in the comedies tend to be of two distinct types. There is the ‘low’comedy of characters such as Touchstone in As You Like It and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These characters are lower class, often coarse and crude, but sometimes also skilled with words. At the other extreme stand Jaques in As You Like It and Feste in Twelfth Night, whose fooling is tinged with melancholy and bitterness, and who are altogether more intellectual and refined than the Touchstone and Bottom and other low characters. Word-play and punning is an essential source of humour, as, for example, in the convoluted speeches of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, on arch exponent of malapropism, or the use of words in wholly unsuitable contexts.

Comic Disguise: Gender-Bending Ironies and Eavesdropping Delights

Disguise is both a theme and a source of comedy. The most obvious form of disguise is the dressing-up of female characters in male clothing, as with Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It. A disguise of this nature allows for multiple ironies, and it is useful to remember that all female parts in Shakespeare’s plays were played by boys. Disguise in another form is seen in the use of eavesdropping. One of the funniest sequences in Shakespeare is the orchard scene in Twelfth Night, in which the steward Malvolio unwittingly unburdens himself of all his private thoughts of love in the sight of his arch-enemies. Eavesdropping is also a significant feature in Much Ado About Nothing, and is the method by which the lovers are brought together.

Love's Triumph: Harmony and Fulfillment in Comedies

Of course, love is a major topic in the comedies, and every comedy has at least one love story at its centre. Love is not merely a method of arriving at a plot. Love signifies a unity and accord between man and woman, and the lovers can be made to represent a Universe in miniature, a Universe in which harmony, peace, and fruitful union have been achieved. The lovers in the comedies frequently start off either misunderstanding themselves and other people, or under threat from the world at large. The triumph of their love, and the multiple marriages that usually end a comedy, are symbolic as well as practical, showing how individuals can win through trouble and hardship to reach happiness and fulfillment. One of the aims of the comedies is to show people harmoniously with one another in society, which is why the comedies operate in groups characters, whilst the tragedies are dominated by one character. The tragedy’s end with peace having been achieved through death and purgation comedies end with peace having achieved through people coming to terms with their own nature, and that of other people.

Conclusion

The comedies are, therefore, funny, but also searching in their analysis of human behaviour. In addition to plays already mentioned, The Merchant of Venice is known as a comedy, although only in the sense of it having a partially happy ending; it’s essentially serious concern is the conflict between the Jew Shylock and the commercial and social leaders of Venice. It does, however, have a courageous, heroine, Portia, who fights for her lover in a man’s world and wins. The Merry Wives of Windsor is also a comedy, and tradition has it was written for Queen Elizabeth I in order to satisfy her demand for another play with Falstaff in it.

Ardhendu De

References: 

1. Tragedies, comedies and histories | Royal Shakespeare Company. (n.d.). Tragedies, Comedies and Histories | Royal Shakespeare Company. Retrieved December 15, 2018, from https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/tragedies-comedies-histories

2. Shakespearean comedy - Wikipedia. (n.d.). Shakespearean Comedy - Wikipedia. Retrieved December 15, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespearean_comedy

3. British Library. (n.d.). British Library. Retrieved December 15, 2018, from https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/an-introduction-to-shakespeares-comedy