Comedy and Control: Shakespeare and the Plautine Poeta

Comedy and Control: Shakespeare and the Plautine Poeta Douglas Bruster Several of Shakespeare's plays come to their conclusions—at least in the logics of the works themselves—mainly through the agency of a central controlling character. Theseus and Oberon in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Vincentio in Measure for Measure, and Prospero in The Tempest, for instance, all appear to wield a considerable influence over the outcome of their plays. Most often aristocratic, this figure effects the drama's dénouement by the discovery and control of information concerning the social world he or she is engaged (however temporarily) in governing. Such information, typically involving familial or romantic relationships, is obtained through disguise, deceit, and/or the assistance of a subordinate character. Although versions of this controlling figure can be found in Shakespeare's histories (e.g., Richard III, and Hal, as both Prince and King) as well as in the tragedies (e.g., lago and Hamlet)—where, however intended, their dramatic machinations bring unfortunate and unhappy results—only in the comedies (including the romances) do such figures enjoy an apparently limitless measure of dramatic control. In doing so, they are frequently perceived as approximating some depiction of the dramatist's art. With his "great globe itself" speech (IV.i. 148-58),1 for example, Prospero traditionally—even notoriously —has been described as symbolically embodying Shakespeare's own position as playwright. With the early examples of Marlowe's Machiavel and Barabas in The Jew of Malta as well as Shakespeare's Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and following the critical lead of Bernard Spivack in his study Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, most commentators have attempted to trace the compositional DOUGLAS BRUSTER is a Lecturer in English at Harvard University. 217 218Comparative Drama lineage of the playwright figure back to the medieval Vice and the Renaissance Machiavel.2 Thus Sidney Homan refers to lago as "Shakespeare's own sinister portrait of the artist," while Sigurd Burckhardt calls him a "built-in playwright, who, presented with a donnée and glorying in his subtlety and skill, sets about shaping a play from it."3 In an essay delineating Prospero's role as manipulative dramatist, Richard Abrams, arguing for his ultimate roots in the villain-playwright of the Machiavellian tradition , holds that "of various character-types on the Shakespearean stage, it is the Machiavel who most faithfully gives back to the playwright the image of his own powers and aspirations, his privilege to do nearly whatever he pleases within his artistic creation."4 Although, as critics like Spivack and Abrams make clear, the Vice/Machiavel tradition undoubtedly had a significant influence on Shakespeare's development of his controlling characters, I want to suggest that in depending upon an active subordinate (e.g., Puck and Ariel) to bring about the drama's resolution, the playwright figure enacts a social dynamic into which the more independent, self-marginalizing Vice/Machiavel enters only with reluctance. This dynamic, I believe—a dynamic that plays an important role in Shakespeare's drama—is ultimately comedie rather than tragédie. Indeed, recent investigations by Susan Snyder and Frances Teague, among others, have demonstrated that many of Shakespeare 's tragedies have a powerful comedie matrix; it is in relation to the substance of these critics' conclusions as well as to much recent work on genre-mixing in the Renaissance generally that I offer my argument.5 Acknowledging the importance of the grotesque tradition to Renaissance dramaturgy, I would like to argue that Shakespeare based his conception of the controlling playwright figure not only on the Vice/Machiavel but also on a powerful prototype from Roman New Comedy, the Plautine poeta—roughly translatable as "maker."6 A servus or slave, the Plautine poeta can accomplish things for his master (usually an adulescens amans, or young lover) precisely because his low status in the social world of the comedy affords him a substantial latitude of agency and activity. He most often brings about the comedie resolution through an inventio, an inspired construction of an object or device by which he can manipulate characters and events in the drama. In what follows I set out the...