Naturals and Jugglers

Naturals and Jugglers Joan Hartwig asked me to be part of her seminar group on Shakespeare's comedy at the meeting of the Shakespeare Association ofAmerica in Ashland, Oregon in 1982. It turned out to be a good deal offun and got me thinking. So when I was invited to give a paper at a Shakespeare conference at Nazareth College, Rochester, New York in 1983, I gave "Naturals andJugglers." It has never been published before. In Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, Robert Weimann made an impressive case for the importance of various popular traditions such as the vice, the clown or fool, and the stage tradition of the platea as a relatively unspecified area from which an actor could comment with some freedom on the major action which took place within the locus, as contributory to the shifting and frequently comic perspectives of most of Shakespeare's drama.1 More recently, in The Comic Matrix ofShakespeare's Plays, Susan Snyder has shown the prevalence of comic assumptions or analogues or comic moments or echoes in nearly all of the tragedies.2 At the 1982 meeting of the Shakespeare Association in Ashland, Oregon, a seminar group focused on "clown scenes" discovered that it was dealing with scenes from all the recognized genres of Shakespeare's plays. Except perhaps for Richard II, that most relentlessly poetic of all the plays, I can hardly think of a play by Shakespeare in which we are not at some point invited to laugh. Such considerations, coupled with the notorious fact that Shakespeare's greatest comic character and some of his best comic scenes appear in a play identified as a "history," have made for some uncertainty in most discussions of Shakespeare's "comedy." Attempts to talk about the more easily recognizable comedies with some Naturals and Jugglers13 precision have resulted in a remarkable proliferation of frequently overlapping descriptive phrases or labels: farce, Roman comedy, comedy of intrigue, Court comedy, comedy of manners, witty comedy, Lylyean comedy, linguistic comedy, romantic comedy, festive comedy, problem comedy, bitter comedy, comical satire, ironic comedy, new comedy, tragicomedy, romance. With such a catalogue of coinages we may feel the need (or even the presence) of another Polonius. The general impulse seems clearly towards the invention of one or more new categorizing phrases for almost every play. At an international meeting I once sat in front of a young German professor of English who punctuated the delivery of what I thought a splendid paper with whispers of "She is confusing her categories!" Unless we share a Germanic preference for pure categories or have a Gallic taste for clear and distinct ideas that surpasses Locke's, the proliferation of labels for the comedies should probably not bother us too much. Those various phrases may actually serve as useful reminders that, however much Shakespeare used and played with traditional genres and traditions, most of them suffered a sea-change in his hands from the theoretically "pure" or predictable types. He was as inventive and as various with tragedy as with comedy: quite apart from the early Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet and the late Timon of Athens, there are remarkably few interesting things one can say about "Shakespearean tragedy" that apply with equal cogency to all six of the great tragedies. If we nevertheless wish to preserve some distinctions between the notions of Shakespearean comedy as a genre and the general comic ambiance or underplots or intrusions or shifting perspectives that we find in most of the plays, we can emphasize the fact that the endings of the comedies are such that most of the auditors or readers may find them happy — at least the plays usually end with the anticipation of weddings rather than of funerals. We might also consider following the tendency of the scientists and pseudo-scientists who, when qualitative distinctions prove difficult or uncertain, nearly always try to quantify. We might assume, say, that those plays at which we laugh most frequently and most consistently are likely to be comedies. But we must almost immediately recognize that the old "laffometers" once popular in Hollywood will provide us nothing like objective evidence. The amount of laughter...