Introduction shakespeare and the Law of Genre

1.2. Mongrel comedy. Laying Down the Law

Over the past one-hundred years, comedy has been studied as a dramatic form which has retained its characteristics from ancient folk practices long after the beliefs that nurtured them had either become obsolete or been subsumed into the secular aspects of theatrical practice. It has been the aim of twentieth century writers like F.M. Cornford, 28 Suzanne K. Langer29 and C.L. Barber to imbue comedy with the Classical credentials required for serious academic scrutiny. Their studies of agrarian fertility rituals, rites of passage and the social inversion of public revels gave comedy an anthropological credibility that had long been denied. In the wake of these readings, the cultural significance of the comic was analysed through a multitude of theoretical critiques as a form with well defined structural components and vital social elements. Indeed, not since the Renaissance has a definition of comedy been so clear, or, at times, so symmetrical.

Many poststructuralist theorists are drawn to comedy’s apparent indifference and resistance to definition.30 The fluidity and plurality of the comic form may house the division of the inauthentic subject, so beloved of postmodern theory, but the ironic delivery of humour is often the product of the sheer diversity of comic locations. Comedy can equally refer to a genre, a tone or a series of events which force us to think multilaterally, as it is both a literary tradition with recognisable structural qualities, and a way of describing isolated events or passages within other types of work.

As a dramatic form, the historical development of comedy appears to confirm the idea of a relatively permeable entity adapting to suit the demands of the day. It is this generic permeability that caused such scholarly exasperation during the Renaissance, since the desire to impose conformity upon dramatic form was synonymous with the desire to impose order upon society. The Elizabethan stage was also continually under attack as the source of various forms of contamination, both psychological and physical and as comedy deals with so much sexual and scatological humour a literary defence had to be mounted against accusations of impropriety. Nevertheless, during the early modern period comic plays, poems and other vehicles for humour existed in a populist schema which continually evaded scholarly precision, as a purity of form was sought for a genre that dealt with themes thought to be local and vulgar. This quasi-Aristotelian attempt to produce a symmetrical literary system reflective of humanity as an amalgamation of two competing facets of character has shaped all subsequent Western theory by positioning comedy antithetically to a vision of art that can somehow communicate beyond the moment of its creation like tragedy.

The ultimate authority on genre theory in the Renaissance is to be found in Plato’s Laws, where the socially inferior form of comedy is divided into two categories: the satirical or the farcical. Out of the various ‘sub-genres’ of farce and satire, the romance paradigm became fluid in the hands of many early modern dramatists, who developed a variety of comic formulae such as ‘domestic comedy’, ‘city comedy’ and ‘humours comedy’. Whether these new idioms were developed n a scathing backlash to the idealism of late Elizabethan romance can only be determined after a close analysis of the social aspects of comedy. However, it is the ‘mongrel’ form of tragicomedy that possesses the key to a fuller understanding of the aesthetics of comic drama, contesting, as it does, the rigidity of genre from the stand-point of a dramatic hybrid once denounced by Dryden31 as an ill-bred dog, ‘barking’ in the face of convention.