Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love by Alexander Leggatt (review)

Reviews 363 The author tries manfully to reduce the complexities of the plots to in­ telligibility: he is as successful as the material allows. The handbook nature of the volume is most evident here, though the author adds a brief critical comment to each summary. While it is something of an exaggeration to speak of “an analysis of the plays,” Mr. Pronko does propound a thesis about Feydeau and his work. He sees the farce as a “serious” genre, a forerunner of the Ab­ surd. The subject matter of the plays does not differ essentially from the melodrama of Dumas fils and Augier or even from the slice-of-life theatre of naturalists like Henri Becque. Feydeau’s farce presents man at the mercy of his own weaknesses—hypocrisy, lust, and greed—in a chase after satisfaction in a meaningless universe. In Pronko’s own words, “The world of Feydeau is the world of the Absurd in which man is invariably pitted against forces that resist his search for happiness and meaning, and rarely allow him to attain even the more realistic goals of peace and pleasure” (198). It may well be that Estragon and Vladimir descend lineally from Feydeau’s cuckolds and cocottes, but certainly not directly. In Feydeau the audience inevitably knows the secret that the characters are struggling to unknot; this superiority of playwright and audience by no means characterizes the playworld of Samuel Bec­ kett. However artificial, the society of the farce has its norms; and order, however superficial, is restored at the end. If man cannot have it all— peace and pleasure—he can, in the farce, finally tell why. Mr. Pronko’s thesis is provocative and his information helpful. As compendium with commentary, Georges Feydeau fills a gap and performs a needed scholarly service. THOMAS E. PORTER University of Detroit Alexander Leggatt. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1974. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974. Pp. xiii + 272. Cloth: $14.00. Paper: $6.75. In his prefatory remarks Alexander Leggatt discards an approach which seeks the unity of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies either as separate plays or as a series. He intends rather to explore the internal variety of the nine romantic comedies examined in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. (The Merry Wives of Windsor is reserved for discussion as citizen comedy in the author’s recent study Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare.) Leggatt is particularly interested in comic tech­ nique, specifically the “interplay of opposing styles and visions” in each of these plays. Through his study he hopes to illuminate Shakespeare’s “dynamic art—growing, changing, self-questioning” (p. xiii). “Dislocation” is the term most frequently employed by Leggatt to designate the comic device or strategy of juxtaposing what the author describes somewhat interchangably as different dramatic “modes,” “idioms,” or “styles.” Though one could wish for clearer definitions 364 Comparative Drama and discriminations in his critical terminology, Leggatt’s larger point is clear. He sees Shakespeare as examining and testing in his romantic comedies different perspectives, different ways of viewing experience— the experience of love most particularly in these plays. Shakespeare’s concern is to insure that a multiple rather than a single understanding of experience prevails. Thus, in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare moves beyond the single market-place vision, the practical world of Plautus, by introducing an idiom of fantasy and mystery. A courtesan to one Antipholus is a devil to the other. Leggatt has some difficulty with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, perceiving in this play Shakespeare’s portrayal of a singular view of love, a negative view of love’s burdens and vulnerabilities. Leggatt lo­ cates the differing perspectives in the lovers themselves, particularly in the character of Julia, who can be at once engaged in and detached from the experience of loving. In The Taming of the Shrew the different idioms result quite obviously from the two inner plots, the romantic, conven­ tional world of the Bianca plot contrasted with the lively and unorthodox world of the Petruchio plot—the twist being that Petruchio’s behavior is itself conventionalized. He is a performer, a play-actor, a gamesman. He orders Kate’s behavior, and in...