On Comedy and Tragedy

In comedy, the world around us has a lot to say about how things turn out for us, yet things don’t turn out badly. Life may or may not convert all our woe into “hey nonny, nonny” like the song in Much Ado About Nothing says it will, but as the Italian saying goes, la vita è bella, life is beautiful. If you’re not too selfish, pretentious, or greedy; if you’re generous and open to the experiences life brings, there’s a place for you in the happiness circle.

Comedy doesn’t take individuals too seriously. It doesn’t harp on the need for them to be strong at the expense of the pleasure principle. Have you ever noticed how many mistaken identities, mix-ups, and silly obstacles there are in comedy? Such things drive comedy, and as Lysander says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” The social forces that drive comic plays don’t really change, though they may be shunted aside for a time—the next pair of lovers will run up against them as did the previous ones.

Still, while we don’t expect “society” (in the sense of a body of laws, rules, imperatives, and demands) to step in and directly fix the conflicts that arise, it turns out that in a comic play, the things that have been blocking happiness resolve before they cause irretrievable harm. The characters don’t even need to be brilliant or incredibly strong or mind-blowingly noble to participate in the resolution. Ordinary folks will do, even if Shakespeare’s comedies often involve people of high social status.

I often give as the reason for comedy’s good outcomes something like the statement that “the disposition of the world, or of time itself, is friendly.” I often suggest further that because of this disposition, most people can live happily, even if not “ever after.”

What does that imply? Should we say that some higher power is making things better because on our own, we would never get them right? What does it mean to say that “the world” or “time” is well disposed toward us? Is divine “grace” at work, or have the gods taken a benign interest in us, shown us compassion? Did Shakespeare believe in that sort of thing? Well, it seems reasonably likely that he did. The belief was common in his time, and it isn’t extinct even in our post-Darwin and advanced physics-laden era.

Shakespeare most likely believed as well that there are forces and impulses within us as individuals (in our capacity as beings who cannot be wholly reduced to, or subsumed by, the collective social structures within which we live ) that can make things right. The ubiquitous idea of “man the microcosm” strongly suggested to educated Elizabethans (see my guide to E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture) that human beings are in fact capable of a great many things, both for better and for worse. Shakespeare may be representing such internal human forces and impulses in a metaphorical way, as if they come from beyond us, and belong to the divine.

Long before Shakespeare, the ancients—at least educated ones who did things like write poetry or engage in philosophy—most likely knew “love” is a passion that we experience mainly within ourselves, though the initial impetus will come from a “love object.” Still, they represented that experience as imposed from outside of us: one was said to have been “pierced with Cupid’s arrow.”

Here’s an example that goes back to the Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos: one of her fragments runs, “Eros shook my soul, / like the wind whistling down the mountain falls upon an oak.” Sappho is clearly emphasizing the inner strength the Greeks so admired—the power within that must boldly expose itself to challenges, even embrace them. What happens within us is at least as important as the thing that comes from outside. The oak survives the storm because its roots run deep.

Shakespeare may be dealing poetically, metaphorically, then, with a redemptive power within the human spirit—something that is often stymied and obscured but never truly extinguished.

Of course, if that’s the case, you’d think that since we “have it in us” to meet life’s challenges, we could simply change our societies so that they allow us to pursue happiness without constant frustration. Evidently, a problem arises here because we have never achieved paradise on earth.

Still, it’s an attractive idea that in his comedies, Shakespeare asserts some redemptive capacities within human beings, even though according to the playwright’s Christian upbringing, people are “fallen” and corrupted from what they once were. It’s possible, from an optimistic perspective like comedy, that many individuals are much better than the mean-spirited, cramped, back-biting social structures in which they live collectively.

As for tragedy, it works from a very different perspective, one that is not accommodating to even our most reasonable hopes for a stable, meaningful life. Moreover, we want to lay the blame where it belongs so we don’t have to affirm some principle absolutely opposed to comedy, like, say, la vita è brutta, life is ugly or wretched. But it’s hard to always blame the tragic protagonists as the bad guys because their quality varies so much—they span the deck from very flawed individuals to characters who get pulled down by unfortunate circumstances.

Macbeth causes his own downfall, but can we really say that about Romeo and Juliet? Or even about Hamlet for that matter—was it Hamlet’s fault that his ghost-father has an axe to grind with the man who killed him? Is it even slightly reasonable to ask a young man to sacrifice himself for the dead past?

Although the protagonist may make serious mistakes, and those mistakes can have dreadful consequences, a Shakespearean tragedy’s unhappy conclusion is usually more complex than that. Consider King Lear, for example—he says, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.” Ah, proportionality! It really seems that in his case, the punishment is worse than the admittedly serious error committed. Lear never sinks to the level of the play’s “monsters of the deep” who prey on one another, as the virtuous character Albany predicts they will.

I believe Shakespeare is interested in a number of key things in his tragedies:

1) The first thing is the necessity, as Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art would tell us, of stripping away life’s guarantees, its illusions of sanity and security, even when that leaves things quite raw or bleak, as in the magnificently unbearable King Lear. Whether we ourselves have precipitated a crisis through our own mistakes, or circumstances beyond our control have brought us the unsettling news that—as Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach,” the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”—there’s an imperative toward understanding. In a tragedy, understanding must happen at all costs, even at the cost of all that we hold dear.

2) There is also an imperative to bear witness to human suffering, whatever and whoever its causes. There is dignity in that imperative—it lays a demand of strength upon us. I find this emphasis in Shakespeare wonderfully Classical in spirit—which is also true of the first imperative mentioned in this section on tragedy—so whatever the state of his knowledge of Sophocles and other ancients, Shakespeare’s tragedies are not isolated from the wisdom of Classical antiquity. It’s uplifting to think of Shakespeare as a “poet of nature” and to insist that he never attended classes at Oxford or Cambridge, but there’s more to him than that. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of the Classics, even in grammar school.

3) In Shakespearean tragedy to varying degrees, there’s an  interest in how social tragedy happens, too. What happens when a society no longer abides by the values by which it claims to be animated. Sometimes things fall apart, as Yeats would say, and the center does not hold. Institutions and values get hollowed out, to use a different metaphor. Tragedy teaches us that once we let that happen, it is very hard to put a society back together again and live meaningfully and with genuine regard for others.

Look what happens in King Lear: the old king doesn’t mean to do it, but he unleashes savage forces within his society that damage it beyond recognition, until only the worst kinds of human beings thrive. In Julius Caesar, what Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators do doesn’t purify Rome, it repeats the same blood-drenched pattern that the great city had come to dread for decades.

One last question suggests itself: how do we put comedy and tragedy together? Does Shakespeare set forth comedy as the solution to the things that go wrong in tragedy, or are these two genres to be thought of as non-overlapping, at least to any sustainable degree?

Perhaps in the mind of a god, comedy and tragedy would fuse into one unified, panoramic vision. But that’s beyond us, so the best thing we can do, it seems, is to see them in proximity: one life begins even as another ends; one person is happy even as another is miserable. In the same instant, both comedy and tragedy unfold. Each is always in the making. There is both comfort and despair in that knowledge.

In the literary sense, what playwrights such as Shakespeare can do is give us an intense (if fiction-generated) experience of each fundamental mode of perception. That is what a “genre” is, after all—not just a set of conventions (though it obviously entails such a set) but a way of seeing and experiencing things.

In drama, is it just that “sometimes life is like this, and sometimes it’s like that?” For the most part, yes—we are given relatively pure doses of comedy, or tragedy, in the hope that there will be something sustaining or healing about the first experience, comedy, and something bracing but also sustaining about the second, tragedy. Something like this notion appears to govern Aristotle’s idea of tragedy as “cathartic” in his Poetics.

Still, we know that Shakespeare takes pains to place comic moments in his tragedies—the Gravedigger and the confused English Ambassador both make us laugh in Act 5 of Hamlet, the Fool leavens the action at times in King Lear, and the musicians are funny in Romeo and Juliet. This seems important because even though it doesn’t rescue the characters caught up in their own tragic experiences, it reminds us that even as one person’s tragedy unfolds, another’s comedy (or just their humdrum existence) continues without a hitch.

If tragedy were to subsume consciousness altogether, the experience would quickly become overwhelming. It’s arguable that that is what happens in King Lear. The play is superb, but some people find it unbearable.

Finally, the plays that (thanks to the nineteenth-century critic Edward Dowden) we now call “romances” (mainly Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest) contain elements of both tragedy and comedy. Or we might say that they are comic plays where tragedy impends but does not come down ruinously upon everyone’s head. In this way, perhaps romance plays are a hinge between comedy and tragedy. They may lose some of the tragic intensity of true tragedy, and a bit of the fun of a true comedy, but something is gained, too, by bringing these genres into close proximity.

For most of us, the romance pattern is probably closest to the pattern of our own lives—we look back and see the road we have taken to get to the present, and it has its comic and its tragic or near-tragic moments or periods, and the occasional chance to make right what has gone wrong, either through bad luck or our own stubborn foolishness. It isn’t realistic to expect that we will live our lives as either pure comedy or pure tragedy. With few exceptions, only characters in a drama or other work of fiction do that.

Last Updated on February 21, 2025 by ajd_shxpr