Beyond a Common Joy: An Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy

And in Conclusion

 q And in Conclusion We began with an examination of the lines in Ben Jonson’s Folio tribute to Shakespeare praising his comedies as surpassing those of Plautus and Terence, on the one hand, and those of Aristophanes, on the other. Jonson preferred Shakespeare to the boy-meets-girl sitcoms of Terence and Plautus and to the satiric bludgeoning posing as comedy that Aristophanes created. He apparently saw Shakespeare as going beyond both New and Old Comedy (though he himself had a taste for Old Comedy and Aristophanes’ work with the whole state of a society). I have argued in this book that what Jonson saw in Shakespeare is the high comic seriousness of comic genius—though not the high pomposity that led Matthew Arnold to dismiss Chaucer. “Serious”here means treating the whole of society as it faces its most significant crises. And if this is what Jonson meant, he was right in thinking that Shakespeare takes the relationship between human desire and whole commonwealths, the fates of empires, as his comic subject. Following the notion that poetry is a kind of philosophy or theology, he invests his comic myths with resonances from the most sacred and laughing, joyous scriptures of the Western world. To create a comedy that would compete with the epic/tragic mode, the poet first restructured the form to make it cover more than private and domestic matters; indeed he made it touch the whole commonwealth —whether that commonwealth be Ephesus, the Forest of And in Conclusion  Arden and its surroundings, Athens, Messina, Venice, Vienna, Illyria, the new world of trade and colonization, or any other constructed community. He does this by introducing a leader figure whose actions put whole communities and states at stake and then creating fusions of the masks or stock character types that he inherited from Roman New Comedy and commedia dell’arte. These fusions give us the sense that we are seeing significant whole communities struggle. In almost every comedy, we see most of Jaques’s whole seven ages from the world stage of the Globe. We watch a scene various enough, conflicted enough, and inward enough to give us the sense that we are watching an important group at work and at play, seeking love and justice, struggling to find meaning in the wasteland of cruelty and lust that confronts them. After A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream the comedies of Shakespeare’s time generally included a morose or melancholy figure who must be defeated or transformed. Vouet’s  Father Time Overcome by Love, Hope, and Beauty captures the spirit of this theme.Time is overcome by love, procreation, and the renewal of communities. In Shakespeare, the morose or melancholy character is not always overcome. He may be transformed or rendered impotent. We may mock the cruelty and superficiality of Shylock’s conversion, and Elizabethan audiences might have too, but he is apparently no longer a threat. We may laugh at Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night when he says he will be revenged, but we do not fear his return as a righteous avenger. Shakespeare reserves a circle outside the ambience of heterosexual desire and courtship for the depressed, a circle where they can be converted, learn contemplation (Jaques), undergo an exorcism for love melancholy (Malvolio), be married (Angelo), reunite with supposedly dead wives (Leontes), or, most dangerously, be forgiven and partially returned to the commonwealth (the sour Neapolitans in The Tempest). Only Don John seems beyond help or hope. In the comedies, the commonwealth faces—or has just faced— external political and military enemies, bad weather, and terrible disease . But its chief “problem” is not the defeat of those objective enemies . Its problem is rather the working out of internal conflicting And in Conclusion  passions—especially melancholy and malice. It has to come home to a solidarity that represents or simulates—on the surface at least—its general good, the common profit of society.The wisdom of the comedies is that while the leader must lead, no one person creates a decent society. The tragedies tell us, on the other hand, that one person can destroy a society. To dampen the passions, the leader often begins with a judgment without mercy. He ends with merciful judgment or just plain mercy. To harmonize the conflicting passions of the group, the play often goes through a sequence where the...