Commentaries on Shakespeare’s Genres: Comedy
Introduction to Greek Old & New Comedy, Shakespearean Comedy
Nullum est iam dictum, quod non dictum fit prius.
Nothing is said now, which hasn’t been said before.
—Terence, Prologue to Eunuchus
Samuel Johnson writes in his “Preface to Shakespeare” that Shakespeare crafted his plays as mixed-genre productions, created from life’s “chaos of mingled purposes and casualties.” With regard to any purer notions of genre, he tells us that this great playwright was most comfortable when writing comedies because they suited his generous imagination and character best. Opinions will vary on this claim, but here it is in its entirety:
In tragedy [… Shakespeare] often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct. [1]
Whichever view we take of the above critical assessment, Shakespeare, in writing at least some of his comic plays, seems to have worked from ancient models, as when he transformed Plautus’s mistaken-identity play Menaechmi into The Comedy of Errors. For that reason, we should discuss ancient comedy briefly for the insight its themes and structure can provide. It’s customary to distinguish between Greek Old Comedy like that of Aristophanes (circa 456-386 BCE) and the Greek New Comedy of Menander (circa 342-291 BCE) and other playwrights, such as his later Roman followers Plautus (circa 254-184 BCE) and Terence (circa 195-159 BCE).
Greek Old Comedy
If you’ve ever read or seen a comedy by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata, The Birds, etc.), you know that it’s rough stuff—mainly topical satire about famous politicians and philosophers. The Clouds, for example, is about Socrates as proprietor of the Thinkery, where all sorts of wildly improbable notions are propagated for the benefit of fools.
Outrageous, bawdy humor is the essence of such plays, and they can pack a political wallop as well: in Lysistrata, Greek women withhold sexual favors from men until they agree to put an end to the ruinous Peloponnesian War. On the whole, characters are ridiculous, vain, and shallow in Old Comedy: a main subject is the perennial quality of human folly, selfishness, and vice. This subject is important in New Comedy as well, but the difference lies in the harsh treatment accorded it in Old Comedy.
Greek and Roman New Comedy
The Greek comic playwright Menander and his later Roman followers Plautus (circa 254-184 BCE) and Terence (circa 190-158 BCE) offer a different brand of comic play. The emphasis is on domestic matters rather than broad political issues. Love, or at least sexual desire treated sympathetically, is central to the action, and there’s also some concern for the relationship between the older generation and the younger, particularly between a father and his son, as well as interest in relations between people of different status, such as masters and their clever slaves.
Still, there’s plenty of fun at the expense of fools, dupes, lovers too old for the mate they desire, and so forth. As is often noted, [2] stock characters are the order of the day in New Comedy: we don’t look to its characters for deep interiority or subjectivity any more than we would have expected those qualities in Aristophanes’ Old Comedy. New Comedy is also expansive in terms of morality: the characters who win out tend to be the ones the playwright supposes the audience will like. In comedy, sympathy trumps propriety.
The popularity of comic mix-ups, disguises, and the like suggests that identities are more interchangeable and less rock-solid than anyone had thought. Depending on the circumstances, of course, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. While blessing the individual’s desire for happiness in the face of the many obstacles life throws in the way of that state, New Comedy makes no extraordinary claims for the individual’s uniqueness or for the special personal dignity that tragic plays usually involve.
New Comedy’s conception of personhood, of “the self,” as we would say, requires no grand forays into the depths of human nature: on comedy’s terms, that would almost certainly be a waste of intellectual and emotional energy. A Hamlet-like interiority (an incredibly complex, even tortured, inner self) would be most unlikely to help a comic character achieve sustainable happiness. In New Comedy particularly, the world (or fate, or whatever term seems appropriate) is well-disposed toward certain characters, and this fundamental disposition on the world’s part largely paves the way to individual, marital, and collective happiness.
The Structure of Terentian Drama
The structure of the New Comedy comes to us from an ancient critic named Aelius Donatus (with some supplementing by Renaissance author Julius Caesar Scaliger), who anchored his principles to the work of Terence. [3] Donatus, a mid-fourth-century CE grammarian and rhetoric teacher, wrote commentaries on Terence’s plays titled Commentum Terenti, Publii Terentii Comoediae Sex.
A. First comes the prologue, which may offer background and context for better understanding the story that will be staged.
B. Next comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established. This stage corresponds roughly to the first act of a modern five-act play. There will also be some destabilizing incident that generates conflict—any form of literature requires conflict.
C. Third comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and become more complicated. This stage corresponds roughly to the second and third acts of a five-act play.
D. Fourth comes the catastasis, in which the plot is about to reach its high point, or in fact reaches that high point, and the action seems to be fully wound up. This term can be used to mean “climax.” This stage or point may occur around the end of the third act or in the fourth, again if we are thinking in terms of the traditional five-act play. (Scaliger’s term.)
E. Last comes the final action, the catastrophe, which in comedy is a happy ending: errors and deceptions are discovered, misunderstandings and murky motives are clarified, situations and identities firm up, and so forth. Society is in good order and people are free to be happy again. This stage will generally occur in the fifth act of a five-act play.
Shakespearean Comedy
Love and Marriage
Shakespearean comedy’s central subject is, of course, love. The aim of this comedy is also profoundly social, and strongly oriented toward marriage as the key social institution. From a traditionalist standpoint, marriage is the guarantor of a society, enabling it to thrive materially and transmit forward its customs and values. But there are many kinds of love, and many qualities of marriage. What kind of love, then, are we dealing with? What kind of relationships might develop, and how? What obstacles are quickly set in the way, by whom and in the name of what value or purpose? By what means are they overcome? These are some of the basic questions we want to ask when studying a comic play.
Of course, there must be obstacles if there is to be any drama at all: desire cannot simply be granted its object. It is subject to deferral and delay before (in most cases, at least) it achieves satisfaction. So the love quest itself—its frustrations, failures, overcomings, and triumphs—will be another central matter to follow. [4]
Consider the diagram below: in the middle, there’s “love” in its purely conventional, societal-value dimension. In this sense, married love is a societal good because couples beget children who perpetuate society’s values and material prosperity. Within this conventional context, love is basically a set of property relations.
Couples are usually in tension with that purely conventional, property-based dimension of love. They’re either using it as cover of some sort or as a means to protect their prosperity, or they’re striving for something truer, better, more genuine—ideal love. The “arranged marriage” phenomenon that persists even today is worth noting. Often, the partners get married and then seek fulfillment outside the marriage—having satisfied the social, familial, or even political demands of respectability, they take a lover. [5] So in sum, the societal aim is conventional marriage, and any number of things can happen once this formal, institutional event has taken place.
Fulfilment in ideal, authentically romantic sense
∧∨
Conventional Marriage as a social institution bestowing respectability and perpetuating society’s values and material success
∨∧
Sexual gratification for its own sake
One thing we can draw from this diagram is that Shakespearean comedy explores the phenomenon of conventionality in life, both its strengths and its failings and limitations. It both protects people and allows them to flourish, but it may also limit them, preventing their growth into fully developed human beings. To a certain extent, it functions as a means whereby the individual can adjust his or her desires to suit the community, and—at least to some small extent—the obverse can also happen, so that a workable equilibrium is achieved. [6] Conventionality and normativity can be stultifying, but they are also productive sites of contestation.
All in all, Shakespeare seems to view the power of convention as a kind of social magic akin to art and artifice. [7] We won’t find this thoughtful playwright simply dismissing conventions or norms in a fit of impatience. He acknowledges the pull of natural impulses, but does not suggest that they must always be indulged, any more than they can be persistently and totally denied. Artifice (which includes conventions like marriage) is always in tension with raw human nature.
The institution of marriage, as we said, can accommodate all sorts of arrangements, some of which conduce to happiness more than others, some less so. In our time, we are impatient with anything short of a marriage that seeks the ideal of true love—marriages that seem to be all about money, or appearances, or dynastic or familial concerns, disappoint or even unsettle us. They all seem to entail an unacceptable degree of “settling” rather than an attempt to live a full life.
We should note that none of this is meant to depress readers and make them think that there’s nothing but settling in Shakespeare’s comic plays. Far from it! Shakespeare’s warrant for representing the more ideal kind of love seems to have been at least an indirect knowledge of ancient Greek romance novels such as Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (Gutenberg e-text), Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoë, and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (Gutenberg e-text). [8] These tales were fueled by the adventures of passionate lovers, and we can find their influence filtered through many texts that Shakespeare and his fellow English playwrights would have known.
Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia is one text that underscores such influences, and so are medieval collections of novelle such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Matteo Bandello’s collection as translated by François de Belleforest and thence Englished by William Paynter as The Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare used this kind of material for his comedies and tragedies alike. [9]
Still, it’s fair to say that modern readers may find themselves surprised at just how accommodating Shakespeare can be when it comes to the varieties of marriage that will work. At times, it seems that almost any kind will serve society’s needs. A marriage may range on a sliding scale, frankly, from near-heaven on earth to a species of restitution, and thence to what Lucio in Measure for Measure calls “hanging, pressing, and whipping.” Yet, it may still suit society’s ends. [10] So this is something to keep in mind: what kind of marriages are the various characters getting themselves into, and whose ends do those marriages serve?
Caritas et Cupiditas: Charity vs. Selfishness (or Greed)
To our observations about “love and marriage,” we should add an understanding of the Christian context that informs Shakespeare’s plays. This is not to say that Shakespeare wears his religious beliefs (be they Protestant or quietly Catholic) [11] on his Elizabethan shirt-ruffles or that he aims to promote whatever religious views he may hold. It is only to say that Christian theology and customs inform his plays and figure directly or indirectly to an important extent. Shakespeare was writing for a Christian audience, and he was not a fiery atheist like his ill-fated rival Christopher Marlowe.
As a main example of this Christian bent, let’s consider the concept of charity. We mentioned likeability with respect to ancient comedy: sympathetic characters win; unattractively vain, ungenerous characters lose. We might reinterpret this notion by applying the Christian opposition between generosity and selfishness or, to use more productive terminology, between charity (caritas) and cupidity (cupiditas).
Caritas has to do with a generous outflowing of love for one’s fellow human beings—it is something that helps to unite not only individuals into couples but indeed entire communities into a functioning civil society. It enjoins forgiveness of wrongs and a bearing of optimism and faith in the teeth of adversity. As Portia, disguised as a learned legal advocate, says at Shylock’s trial in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strained.” [12]
Cupiditas, by contrast, has to do with individual selfishness—a cupidinous or greedy person seeks and accumulates riches and status more to lord them over others than really to enjoy what has been gained. Perhaps Jesus’s remark in the Gospels, “For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it” [13] says it best: selfish, greedy, mean-spirited people misunderstand the purpose of life, and lose all the more when they win on their own terms. Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge (before his transformation) is a fine example of this lose-by-winning outlook.
Openness to Time and Chance
As in ancient comedy, so in Shakespeare: after the fashion of a benevolent God’s Providence, “time and chance” are friendly, at least if a character is likeable and generous. Consider the following passage from the Hebrew scriptures, Ecclesiastes 9:11:
I returned, and I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet bread to the wise, nor also riches to men of understanding, neither yet favor to men of knowledge: but time and chance cometh to them all. [14]
In comedy, the characters may want change to happen in just the ways they specify so that they can obtain their heart’s desire. They may even want things to stay the same, but that kind of wish is seldom, if ever, granted. Situations—accidents and time—get the better of even the most passionate resolutions and the most serious invocations of dignity. As the Bible says about humans generally, “time and chance cometh to them all.” It comes to the swift and the slow; the strong and the weak; the wise and the foolish; the business-savvy and the unsavvy; to the learned and the unlearned.
A generous or charitable character, as described above, will respond to the coming-on of time and accident in an open-minded, open-hearted way and will thereby befriend change, at least implicitly. The best example of right attitude in this regard may be what the shipwrecked maiden Viola says near the beginning of Twelfth Night: neither giving in to despair about the possible loss of her brother nor worrying about the particulars of her new plan to serve a widowed Illyrian noblewoman (she ends up serving the Duke of Illyria instead), she declares, “What else may hap, to time I will commit.” [15]
Viola will face whatever comes with a bold, open spirit. She is both a woman of substance and a comic optimist. In at least some of Shakespeare’s comedies, there’s a hint of Providence about the patterns of human desire that drive the plays toward successful resolution.
Depth of Character, Interiority
It is possible to deepen comedy and concentrate on human beings’ potential to change, to grow, and to accept the limitations imposed upon them by the world. Some of Shakespeare’s best comedies do just that. His mature work strays from the standard models of ancient comedy and explores the deeper dimension of his characters and subjects at will, so that is something that we can state simply and follow in the various comedies we read: which characters, if any, seem (to borrow a line from Hamlet) to “have that within which passes show”? [16]
It’s true that “interiority” or intense subjectivity is mostly the province of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, but the fact that it is not an absolute requirement in comedy does not keep the irrepressible Shakespeare from exploring it in any of his dramatic modes: comedy, tragedy, history, romance.
Green Worlds
It may prove useful to divide Shakespeare’s deeper comic plays into a couple of very broad patterns. The first is the so-called “green world” pattern that critics such as the myth specialist Northrop Frye have so well described. [17] In this pattern, some variation on the following will happen: several characters leave the corrupt court or city and go to the forest or some other magical green space, and at last, when all is well, most will return to the court or city, or are preparing to do so when the play ends.
The green world is a place where one can experiment, learn, and experience life and love with relative freedom from the strictures of city or court life. The green world may or may not be “magical,” but being there will allow certain characters to do or learn things that they couldn’t in their usual environment. What is to be learned, or experienced, or done varies, of course, from play to play.
The plays that fit best within this pattern are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona; among the romance plays, there are The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.
In some other plays, we may see a limited or adapted variety of green world: in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Pericles travels across the ocean throughout the play, and thereupon suffers strange accidents and transformations—we might call it a “blue world.” The Welsh countryside in Cymbeline is akin to a green world, thanks to the hardy values it teaches the young princes Arviragus and Guiderius. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the hilarious catastrophe toward the play’s end takes place in a community forest that may be treated as akin to a green world.
In plays such as Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice, by contrast, we are dealing with comedy that works itself out mainly or entirely in urban or courtly (if far from perfect) spaces, and in these spaces the relevant characters must learn, experience, and do whatever they need to do if they are to end up happy. Perhaps it’s just that the total situation itself amounts to the “special place” where lives and loves can mend. In such plays, to borrow a line from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, “America is here or nowhere.” [18]
In Measure for Measure, for example, Duke Vincentio leaves Vienna and lets Angelo take his place administering justice for a while, but he does not go to “a wood outside Vienna.” In Much Ado About Nothing, while some key action takes place in a garden, it is not a particularly wild place; Love’s Labor’s Lost houses noble ladies out in a field in pitched tents, but this isn’t a transformative setting for them; The Merchant of Venice’s most critical action takes place on a beautiful estate named Belmont and in the Venetian setting where Shylock’s trial is held.
But again, it would be tiresome to try to fit every Shakespeare comedy into, or exclude others from, the green world pattern. It’s best just to take the plots and patterns as they come.
Broader Reflections on Comedy, Then and Now
The modern situation comedy—Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm are sophisticated examples—is remarkably like older varieties of comedy, including New Comedy and Shakespeare’s complex adaptation of it. Both of the shows mentioned seem to straddle the older, harsher and satirical mode (Aristophanic, that is) and the more love-based, somewhat gentler approach taken by the New Comedy and Shakespeare. A number of silly but mostly sympathetic characters [19] get themselves into and out of preposterous scrapes from one episode to the next in a competitive world, and through it all they don’t change much.
Such characters get insulted, taken advantage of, take advantage of others (though not mean-spiritedly), fall in and out of love, misunderstand or deceive one another at every turn, get jobs and get hilariously fired from jobs, get tied up in in knots over mundane things, obtain pleasure and ease and then throw them away on a whim or due to some error or fit of vanity, and then, as if nothing had ever gone wrong, they’re ready for the next absurd thing life brings.
In Curb, for example, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David has all the money a person could want, but being rich doesn’t keep him out of some crazy, ludicrous predicament in every episode. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld can’t stop losing out on his many romantic prospects because there’s always some reason why he can’t be satisfied with whatever lovely, accomplished woman he’s with. George Costanza is guaranteed to blow every opportunity for advancement and success because of his shallowness and neurotic tendencies, and so forth. The self-induced failures never end with these characters, but they remain happy-go-lucky, up for whatever life brings. [20]
Comedy in the broadest sense reminds us that we seldom learn as much as we should (or anything, for that matter) from our mistakes, but it also gives us credit for being optimists and opportunists in spite of the misfortunes life throws our way. There’s a bit of Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner in many a comic character: that fur-bearing evildoer Wiley Coyote isn’t going to keep the “poor little Roadrunner” from its appointed rounds (BeepBeep!), nor is Elmer Fudd going to stop Bugs from doing whatever the “wascally wabbit” wants to do.
In comedy, the protagonist’s desire is subject to multifarious deferrals and detours, but not to permanent frustration. The comic disposition of time towards selected characters is friendly: time and chance (accident) are on the comic hero’s side, at least if he or she is likeable and generous. In comedy, life is rich and full of opportunities—La vita è bella, “Life is beautiful,” as the Italian saying goes, and comedy best reflects that hopeful, sunny approach. [21]
General Questions to Ask about Shakespeare’s Comic Plays
To what extent do the main characters step out as strong individuals, people with integrity, depth, or interiority?
—In comedy we are usually dealing with characters who fit into some recognizable pattern or type, but does that truism do justice to the play you’re studying?
What do the characters seek?
—Consider the varieties of desire and the objects of desire. If it’s love, what kind or quality is it?
—Characters seek not only love but also transcendence, security, understanding, clarity, etc. (Evidently, there’s more to life than news, weather, sports, and Cupid’s arrow.)
What obstacles stand in the way of characters’ fulfilling their desires?
—There are both internal and external hindrances.
—That is, not everything is a matter of stern patriarchs getting in the way, etc.
How do the main characters react to the obstacles that stand in their way?
—Reactions, as always, can tell us a lot about a character’s depth and understanding.
What is the disposition of time and chance?
—Time is on the comic protagonist’s side, but what more can be said in this regard about the play you are studying? Whose side, for example, are time and chance not on in a given play? Why?
—Are time, chance, and events dealt with in a mostly realistic manner, or a fantastical one? Why might the playwright be dealing with these things in a “non-verisimilar” or non-lifelike way?
Copyright © 2024 Alfred J. Drake
ENDNOTES
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[1] Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/12/2024.
[2] Shakespeare, William. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93861-6. See Katharine Eisaman Maus’s excellent introductory essay, “Shakespearean Comedy.” 121-36.
[3] Terence was a freedman from Libya, or Roman North Africa. His full name was Publius Terentius Afer.
[4] Of great note, too, will be the perspective and experience of those who, whether by choice or due to some other factor, remain outside the charmed circle of marriage partners at the play’s end. There are other worthy objects to pursue than love—might some characters be more interested in those things?
[5] Ezra Pound’s translated poem titled “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” evokes this kind of marriage.
[6] If this formulation sounds unattractive, that’s probably because we twenty-first-century “children of the Romantics” think of individual identity, the “self,” as something mostly independent from exterior influences and controls. In Shakespeare’s time, the Early Modern Era, identity was still to a considerable degree defined as it had been during the Middle Ages, in relation to other human beings, in light of one’s social duties and obligations. These factors defined one’s “office” or station in life. This way of defining identity was changing in Shakespeare’s time, but it had not yet changed to the extent that it has now.
[7] It almost goes without saying that we will find Shakespeare casting art in this light, as a kind of social magic allied with the other positive institutions and forces in human life.
[8] See Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, and Daphnis and Chloe by Longus.
[9] See Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (MDZ), Boccaccio’s Decameron (Gutenberg e-text), and Matteo Bandello’s collection as translated by François de Belleforest and thence Englished by William Paynter as The Palace of Pleasure (Gutenberg e-text).
[10] Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, for example, is an immature young man, a disappointingly typical creature of his gender and social class. Hero deserves better, but he’s all she’s going to get. Sometimes a female character in Shakespeare will be enamored of a male character who is manifestly beneath her dignity, as happens with Helen chasing after the supremely annoying Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. The man is never for one minute worthy of her notice, much less her love. In Measure for Measure, arguably none of the marriages seem suitable.
[11] David E. Anderson’s 2008 article “Was Shakespeare Catholic?” in PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly explores this controversial topic. Accessed 9/16/2024.
[12] Shakespeare. The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 467-521. See 508, 4.1.182, where Portia explains that “The quality of mercy is not strained.” That is, one can’t force another person to show mercy; it must come from within. Mercy, here, or compassion, is very similar to charity.
[13] See Matthew 16:25. Geneva Bible, 1599. Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9/8/2024.
[14] See Ecclesiastes 9:11. Geneva Bible, 1599. Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9/8/2024.
[15] Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 743-97. See 746, 1.2.59.
[16] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 365, 1.2.85.
[17] Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. See his Anatomy of Criticism. 1973 repr. Orig. pub. 1957. See Third Essay: The Mythos of Spring, 163-86.
[18] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister. Vol. 1, 381. Accessed 9/16/2024.
[19] One should expect robust and contentious views on which characters are the most or least “likeable” since they are self-absorbed and can be insensitive to others.
[20] As an aside, we might pay tribute to one of the most successful efforts resembling the harsher, older style of comedy, the cable series Veep, starring Julia-Louis Dreyfus (a Seinfeld alumna) as an almost sociopathic Vice President who ends up President when her boss resigns, and then narrowly loses the next highly unusual election. Back-stabbing talk and action abounds, as do viciously witty barbs and insults. Through it all, the viewer can only hope “D.C.” isn’t this horrible.
[21] This attitude contrasts markedly with that of tragedy, where the world is stark and unforgiving, and where we follow the linear path staked out for us by the gods or by our errors to an inexorable demise. Tragedy is about accountability, and nothing that’s done can truly be fixed or undone. Our attention is riveted upon the thoughts and actions of a superior character in confrontation with a harsh, implacable world, a world of stone that seems determined, or designed, to crush human yearnings after permanence and greatness.