Introduction shakespearean comedies

1. ELEMENTS OF SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

We’ve all been taught in school how Shakespeare’s plays tend to fall into one of two categories—comedy or tragedy—but sadly it’s never fully appreciated how the bard’s innovations have helped shape the comedy genre as we know it today. Though not a comedian by any stretch, Shakespeare’s penchant for clever puns and wordplay have nevertheless proved influential across the ages, as has his frequent use of comic devices and his embrace of a light-hearted tone.¹

Shakespeare’s lack of joke-telling and quipping is often counterbalanced by his imaginative use of insults, a legacy which itself has left a mark upon the development of humorous writing well into the Jacobean era and beyond. However, there are notable narrative elements which tend to underpin most of Shakespeare’s comedies, and once you recognise them it’s almost impossible not to notice their usage in many modern works too. Even more, as writers we can take these elements and play upon them in our own writing for comedic effect.

Here are the most commonly-recognised elements of Shakespearean comedy.

1. Mistaken Identity and/or Misconceptions

Situations where characters impersonate or are mistaken for somebody else are a long-standing comic tradition which Shakespeare only cemented in his time. This can be seen in Shakespearean comedies such as As You Like It, in which Rosalind impersonates a man in order to mentor her would-be lover into the man she secretly desires; or in Twelfth Night, where a shipwrecked Viola washes up in a strange land and decides to dress up as a man to enter into service of the nobility.

How characters get embroiled in gender mix-ups can be due to circumstances or just plain old-fashioned deception, but, all in all, the humour arises from the audience’s awareness of their predicament, in contrast to how others remain oblivious to it. Modern comedy films such as Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire also make use of this same comic technique, where male characters impersonate women to either advantage their career, or to bypass custody restrictions following a divorce battle. In either case, Shakespeare recognised how disguising one’s gender can be funny when it serves the need of the story.

2. Reason versus Emotion

The historical period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays was defined by an intellectual battle between Apollonian values (such as reason) versus Dionysian values (like desire). How does one act in the world—by following our passions, or by listening to our heads? It’s no surprise, then, that many of Shakespeare’s comedies toy with this dichotomy, challenging audiences to consider matters of the heart, whilst comparing it to the more rational considerations of the human mind.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia disobeys her father by refusing to accept Demetrius as her husband. Instead, she chooses to pursue a romance with Lysander, and is willing to face the possibility of a death sentence for doing so. Her motivations are led by emotion, and not dictated by reason. Only adding to confusion is Helena’s statement “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” when Hermia’s actions suggest the opposite to be true. In this way, Shakespeare’s comedies tend to wittily expose the contradictions inherent in human behaviour. In short, it’s all about choosing between what your heart wants, and what your mind says, and therein lies the humour.

3. Fate and the Fantastical

Shakespeare’s comedies enjoy invoking the supernatural and tend to portray humans as mere play-things in some grand mystical game. The fairies Puck and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream mischievously toy with the characters’ emotions throughout the play, so everything the characters experience is interpreted as being due to the impish wiles of magical beings. Whether through strife or tenacity, all character revelations in Shakespeare’s comedies are seen as being due to events beyond human control, or even our mortal understanding, which is why audiences still find it funny today.In another instance, the use of magic in making one’s thoughts a reality is the inciting moment in The Tempest, as without Prospero’s meddling there would be no shipwreck and therefore Viola would never have arrived in Illyria in the first place. Again, magic is deemed as the unseen motivator of human struggle, a catalyst which subjects characters to wrestle with life’s little ironies to a point where humour often arises. Given comedies end happily, you could say all’s well that ends well (if you’ll pardon the reference), despite the complicated machinations of fate, but Shakespeare’s comedies often rely on the fantastical to provide an explanation for the convoluted goings-on of our everyday struggles.²

4. Idyllic Settings

It’s remarkable just how many settings in Shakespeare’s comedies are given idyllic and almost fantastical settings—there’s the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, an enchanted wood outside the city of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the mysterious island of Illyria in Twelfth Night. Each location has been carefully brought to life by Shakespeare to depict perfection—lands which only convey the world as we would wish it to be, havens of tranquillity and rich in nature. This is no accident on Shakespeare’s part, of course.

The main reason why Shakespeare enjoyed setting his comedies in almost paradise-like locations is because, more often than not, things tend to go wrong in these plays. Mistakes are made, complications are rife, misunderstandings always arise, so when audiences see how characters living in paradise engage in mishaps too, it only underscores the comedy. After all, if things can go awry in seemingly perfect worlds, it becomes strangely comforting to those of us who live in the real world. This is why many find Shakespeare’s comedies so resonant today, as it proves that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.

5. Separation and Reconciliation

Naturally, love is the central theme in most Shakespeare plays, but they are even more pronounced in comedies. In particular, the idea of lovers being separated—such as Berowne and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost—is a frequently-recurring element in a Shakespearean comedy. Where there is separation, of course, there is also reconciliation, so it’s hardly surprising when we see lovers reunite, although in some cases the journey to that point can be arduous and fraught with uncertainty, particularly when cross-dressing is involved.

Perhaps the most interesting and insightful depiction of love in a Shakespearean comedy is in Much Ado About Nothing, where Benedick and Beatrice spend most of the play at loggerheads with each other. In fact, some would go so far as to say they both hate each other, with each character brandishing scars from past relationships which have led them to dismiss the idea of love altogether. By the final act, of course, they realise they are in love and end up married. Benedick and Beatrice’s progression from mutual hate to romantic love is an ironic but very true insight into how many real romances develop, and it remains a testament to Shakespeare as an observer of how human relationships work.

6. Happy Endings

Lastly, but perhaps most crucially, one of the most notable elements of a Shakespearean comedy is a happy ending. Unlike tragedies, which always end with death, Shakespeare’s comedies ended in a celebratory manner, often with love and marriage as the biggest focal points. To modern eyes, this may seem trite given how cynical modern readers can be about the pitfalls of holy matrimony. For its time, however, marriage was a symbolic event, not just a means of achieving unity and higher purpose, but also of providing resolution to life’s woes. Ultimately, it was a means of allowing Shakespeare to end on a hopeful note.

In plays which invoke the supernatural, happy endings in Shakespeare’s plays can also come about as a result of deus ex machina. Known as ‘god in the machine,’ as a literary device it refers to instances which conclude a narrative thanks to a contrived but wholly unlikely occurrence, as if God has waved a magic wand to tie up loose ends. This can be seen in As You Like It, when the chief antagonist Duke Frederick is persuaded to give up his power by a religious man, thus allowing Shakespeare’s protagonists to marry and live happily ever after. Ultimately, one should interpret happy endings in Shakespearean comedies as his way of resolving the confusion his characters experience throughout his plays. Essentially, it’s a form a comic denouement.All in all, elements of Shakespearean comedy are myriad and even today there are still many aspects to his plays which we could analyse and dissect³. What’s most obvious, however, is that Shakespeare’s understanding of the complicated interactions between people have laid the foundations for most comedic storytelling. Shakespeare’s comedies explore how experiences may not necessarily be as we perceive it to be; they found humour in pondering how suffering may be due to reasons beyond our control; and they expose the irony in how thinking rationally stands in stark contrast to our heart’s desires. For those reasons, it’s easy to appreciate why his plays have retained a timeless appeal, and for writers there is still much to be learned.

2.CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

When the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio, was published in 1623, its contents page divided them into three categories: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. ⁴The list of Comedies included Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, plays that modern audiences and readers have not found particularly ‘comic’. Also included were two late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, that critics often now classify as ‘Romances’. If we ask ourselves what these four plays have in common with those such as As You Like It or Twelfth Night, which we are used to calling ‘comedies’, the answer gives us a clue to the meaning of ‘comedy’ for many of Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries. All of them end in marriage (or at least betrothal). Comedies head towards marriage. This is a useful place to start thinking about the typical shape of comedies. Marriages conventionally represent the achievement of happiness and the promise of regeneration. So important to Shakespeare is the symbolic power of marriage that some end in more than one marriage. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end with three. In the final scene of As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, takes the stage to preside over no fewer than four nuptial couplings and to celebrate ‘High wedlock’ (5.4.144) in song. All the play’s couples have achieved happiness through misunderstanding. Orlando has wooed Rosalind in make believe, not grasping how his feelings were being reciprocated. Orlando’s brother Oliver, having repented his previous vindictiveness to Orlando, has been smitten by the apparently poor Aliena, not realising that she is Rosalind’s friend Celia. Phebe the shepherdess had preferred Ganymede (in fact the disguised Rosalind) to the adoring but low-born Silvius, but has learnt her error. Touchstone has won Audrey, the country girl, almost casually by impressing her with his mock courtly talk. This last pairing, founded on vanity and ignorance, seems considerably less satisfying than the other three: even here, in one of the lightest of Shakespeare’s comedies, we are invited not to feel easy about every marriage. In other Shakespeare comedies, some concluding marriages – Claudio and Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, the Duke and Isabella in Measure for Measure – seem designed to look convenient rather than affectionate. In Shakespearean comedies much that is funny arises from the misconceptions of lovers. In Much Ado about Nothing the friends of Benedick, whom we have seen mocking Beatrice and scorning love, arrange for him to overhear them talking about how desperately Beatrice in fact loves him. The trick is enjoyably justified when he next meets Beatrice and determinedly interprets her rudeness as concealed affection. Yet the trick takes us further. Once Beatrice has been deceived by her friends in similar fashion, these two characters, who both once disdained the follies of courtship, are on the path to love and marriage. All this deception would not be amusing if we could not feel confident that it will produce a happy resolution In the play’s sub-plot, the deception of Claudio by Don John indicates how a deceived lover might, in another kind of play, be on his way to creating a tragedy. Interwoven with the plot of Benedick and Beatrice’s love story is the drama of so-called ‘love’ (Claudio for Hero) turned into murderous hate. However satisfying the former courtship, it is shadowed by the vengefulness of the untrusting Claudio. For the most part, Shakespeare’s comedies rely on benign misunderstanding and deception. They therefore put a premium on dramatic irony, where we know better than the perplexed lovers. An outstanding example is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we understand the magic of the love potion, mistakenly applied by Puck to Lysander’s eyes, and can relish not only the love talk he spouts to Helena, but her befuddlement. When Puck, in an effort to remedy his mistake, squeezes the juice onto Demetrius’s eyes and he, waking to see Helena, also pours forth professions of love for her, we hear how easily and eloquently men can think they love one woman or another. Hermia, who thought that Lysander loved her, is furiously jealous while Helena is convinced that there is a conspiracy to deceive her. We laugh at their perplexity because we know that the magic that produced it will eventually resolve it and ensure a happy ending. The lovers will return from the forest, that place of confusion and transgression, to the institution of marriage. A comparable kind of dramatic irony is produced by Shakespeare’s use of disguise in comedy – particularly the disguising of women as young men. In As You Like It there is a delicious comedy in Orlando’s enacted wooing of Rosalind, who prompts him in the guise of a young man to whom he can speak without reticence. In Twelfth Night, Olivia who, mourning her brother’s death, has sworn to be ‘a cloistress’ (1.1.27) and keep herself a veiled recluse for seven years, finds herself smitten by Cesario, a young man sent with messages from Duke Orsino. Cesario is, of course, the disguised Viola, and the comedy of Olivia’s mistakenly amorous responses to him/her is all the funnier because it corrects Olivia’s self-denying and impossible mournfulness. As ever in Shakespeare’s comedies, it takes mistakes to teach characters the truths of their own hearts. Olivia bumps into Viola’s twin brother, Sebastien, and proposes marriage to him. He is hilariously puzzled but compliant; it is as if he knows that he is in a comedy, where accident and error will mysteriously produce happy consequences. The apparent restraint placed upon a playwright of Shakespeare’s day – all women must be played by young male actors – becomes a kind of artistic freedom, enabling the characters to switch their sexual identities. ⁵The action of Twelfth Night takes place at some uncertain date in Illyria, an imagined place where the Italian-seeming court of Orsino is neighbour to the apparently English household of Olivia. Several of Shakespeare’s comedies have such highly imaginary settings – the magical wood outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. Only one, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is set in England, and this is an opportunistic piece, written to exploit the popularity of the character of Falstaff. Shakespeare was unusual in invariably finding foreign (and timeless) locations for his comedies. In his day, stage comedy frequently had a contemporary and English (often London) setting. Tragedies took place in Spain, France or Italy; comedies nearer to home. Shakespeare’s best-known rival dramatist, Ben Jonson, set Every Man in His Humour (first performed in 1598) in Italy, but later revised it and relocated it to London, partly in response to popular taste. Later Jonson comedies such as The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair were also set in London and belong to a genre of so-called ‘city comedies’ that attracted other accomplished playwrights such as John Marston and Thomas Middleton. Comedy was traditionally a ‘lower’ genre than tragedy or history, and so these comedies by Shakespeare’s contemporaries justified themselves by their satirical ambitions. Satire was a higher genre than other kinds of comedy, commended by classical authors as morally improving. City comedies had a moral purpose: they mocked current follies and vices. Shakespeare was little interested in topical satire. Yet there is some evidence that the rules and conventions governing comedy were loose in Shakespeare’s day. The title pages of the various quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays indicate that generic categories were not hard and fast. The quarto edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) announces it as ‘A Pleasant Conceited Comedy’ and the quarto Taming of the Shrew declares it to be a ‘wittie and pleasant comedie’. Yet the title page of The Merchant of Venice (1600) calls it ‘The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice’.

These title pages – almost certainly composed by booksellers rather than the playwright – tell us about the appeal of word play and contests of wit to Shakespeare’s first audiences. To us The Taming of the Shrew might seem a play about sexual politics, but it was probably initially admired for being ‘wittie’: that is, for featuring two leading characters who were skilled in verbal antagonism. Verbal humour, often dependent on puns and allusions, is sometimes difficult to translate on the modern stage, but it was essential to Elizabethan and Jacobean expectations of comedy. One of Shakespeare’s most popular comic characters, Sir John Falstaff, arrived on the stage in history plays but was celebrated for his verbal dexterity. As he announces, ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (Henry IV, Part 2, 1.2.9–10). The quarto edition of Henry IV, Part 1 (1598) was advertised as including ‘the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe’. Subsequently, the title page of the quarto edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) described it as ‘A most pleasant and excellent Conceited comedie, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor’.Shakespeare was also remarkable for insisting on the comic in the midst of tragedy. All his tragedies include clowning. The most notable example is the Fool in King Lear, who makes jokes out of the King’s predicament and is permitted, under the guise of foolery, to admonish him. All Shakespeare’s major tragedies include a minor character who makes jests at the expense of the tragic actors. Shakespeare was not the first tragedian of his era to do this: Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus features clown scenes parodying the terrible ambition of the play’s protagonist, leading him to sell his soul. What is frightening can also be absurd. Hamlet has the grave-digger joking about mortality. He was often omitted in 18th- and 19th-century productions as offending against dramatic propriety. Also an embarrassment to later interpreters was the Porter in Macbeth, jesting about the effect of alcohol on a man’s sexual performance at the very heart of the play’s darkness. It is often forgotten that even Othello has a Clown. In Act 3, Scene 1, a scene rarely included in modern productions, Othello’s Clown mocks Cassio with doubles entendres about venereal disease that Cassio seems not to understand, comically enacting the cluelessness about sexual motives that lies behind the oncoming tragedy. Tragi-comedy has often been thought to be Shakespeare’s special creation. It is a term that can usefully be applied to four plays that Shakespeare wrote late in his career: The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Though these all end with the prospect of a marriage that will redeem the errors of the past, none of them has much room for laughter. All of them dramatise anger, violence and bitter jealousy. All except The Tempest include the deaths of some characters. They are comedic rather than comic. Critics have long been in the habit of calling them ‘romances’, and the description, dividing them off from the comedies, seems a useful one. On the other hand, some earlier plays – Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and perhaps The Merchant of Venice – while ending in betrothals and containing scenes of comic misunderstanding, have such dark material at their hearts as to escape our usual idea of comedy. The term ‘problem plays’ was coined for this group at the very end of the 19th century.⁶ It is a label that has been much contested by critics, but it points to an important fact about Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. : The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Though these all end with the prospect of a marriage that will redeem the errors of the past, none of them has much room for laughter. All of them dramatise anger, violence and bitter jealousy. All except The Tempest include the deaths of some characters. Even as he relished comedy he pushed against its limitations. hakespearean Comedy is a kind of romantic comedy, which ends on a happy note through a matrimonial relationship between various characters. Marriage plays a vital role in a typical Shakespearean comedy. Any comedy, which follows the pattern of comedy modeled by Shakespeare in his comedies, would be termed as Shakespearean comedy. It is totally different from classical comedy, wherein the classical rules are observed strictly. A typical Shakespearean comedy shows the following characteristics, which differentiate it from other forms of comedies:

3.LOVE IN SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

Love is the crux of the matter in a typical Shakespearean comedy. Every Shakespearean comedy, predominantly deals with the theme of love. The very beginning lines of Twelfth Night show us how Duke Orsino is expressing his love for Olivia. Look at the following lines:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

(Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare)

J. W. Lever in his book, Elizabethan Love Sonnets, remarks that, “in Shakespearean comedy love is the means of all human fulfillment. This orientation comes about without a spiritualizing of love’s physical basis. Shakespeare’s heroines are lacking in the saintly qualities of the Petrarchan mistress. Far from raising their lovers’ thought above ‘base desires’ Rosalind teaches Orland how to woo and Juliet reciprocates Romeo’s ardour so frankly that he promptly forgets the chaste attractions of his former lady.”⁷

The theme of love runs through all comedies of Shakespeare. For instance, there is a chain of love in Twelfth Night. In this beautiful comedy, we observe that Viola is in love with Orsino, Orsino is having a crush on Olivia, and Olivia is in love with Cesario. That’s why; it makes it the most delightful comedy of Shakespearean Comedies. Every one of them feels depressed due to having sentimental love for each other. Marriage plays an important role in all of Shakespearean comedies. It becomes an obsession and prime concern of the main characters to get engaged and married to the lady or gentleman of their choice. That’s why; we can observe the characters engaged in silly pursuits to materialize their dreams of marriage. It is the element of marriage that resolves all the issues and brings an end to the long lasting riddles and rivalry recurring throughout the comedy. For example, in Twelfth Night, we observe that Viola enters into wedlock with Orsino and Olivia gets married to Sebastian, the brother of Viola. Thus, it resolves the issue of mistaken identity. Olivia comes to know that Cesario is actually a female, named Viola, while Orsino also comes to know about the real identity of Viola. Look at the following lines, wherein Duke Orsino calls Cesario, though, he has come to know about the real identity of Viola: "Cesario", come;

For so you shall be, while you are a man;

But when in other habits you are seen,

Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.

(Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare)