Beyond a Common Joy: An Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy

2. Shakespeare and the Invention of Grand Comic Form

 q  Shakespeare and the Invention of Grand Comic Form When Ben Jonson writes his introductory poem for the First Folio, he casually mentions Shakespeare’s outshining his contemporaries in tragedy and his parity with the ancients, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. But when he speaks of Shakespeare’s comedies, he claims for them an unrivaled place: [W]hen thy Socks were on, Leave thee alone, for the comparison Of all, that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When like Apollo he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm! Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; Shakespeare and the Invention of Grand Comic Form  But antiquated and deserted lie As they were not of Nature’s family.1 The Jonsonian Shakespeare supersedes all that Greece, Rome, or subsequent cultures have offered in the mode of comedy, even outreaching Aristophanes,Terence, and Plautus. As he combines “Apollo’s”wisdom with “Mercury’s”eloquence, he writes Nature, or what natural wit dictates , according to Jonson’s common use of the term nature: “Nature herself was proud of his designs, / And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines!” The New Comedy writers, Plautus and Terence, are obvious candidates for Jonson’s list as Shakespeare writes a species of New Comedy from The Comedy of Errors on, and people like Francis Meres in his own time recognized him as claiming the mantle of the Romans. Even in The Tempest at the end of his career he continues to draw on Plautus for story lines and on Terence for the double plot.2 But so pervasive is the influence of New Comedy on Shakespeare that critics have argued that tragedies such as Hamlet adopt the New Comedy masks—the old man, the matron, the young lovers, the parasite—for utterly non-comic purposes. However, this chapter is not so much about the details of Shakespeare ’s adaptation from Plautus and Terence as about the broad outlines of how he developed the New Comedy and Early Modern comic form beyond the New Comedy to say things about the state and about the human community’s construction of itself out of diverse materials. In this connection Aristophanes is the crucial name in Jonson’s list, for he points to Shakespeare’s larger-than-New-Comedy scope.The Old (or satirical) Comedy of Aristophanes attracted Jonson and appears to have formed partially the basis of the aesthetic of three of his early plays (Every Man Out, Poetaster, and Cynthia’s Revels). Aristophanes also informed the great comedies of his middle period in a more subtle way.3 Jonson knew that many of the plays labeled comedic in his time followed Plautus and Terence and observed only the complex webs that love weaves: “a duke in love with a countess, the countess in love with the duke’s son and so forth with much cross-wooing.”4 Since Shakespeare and the Invention of Grand Comic Form  Shakespeare’s plots are always such love-mongering constructions on the surface, Jonson could easily have placed him with the entertaining but lesser souls who give us much “cross-wooing.”But what he saw in Shakespeare’s comedies that went beyond cross-wooing—what raised them above conventional love-mongering and put them even above those of the most ambitious of ancients, Aristophanes—is, I think, their great subjects; Jonson says Aristophanes treats the “best men,” that is, leaders, the usual subjects of Renaissance tragedy. At his worst, he treats them with scurrility and, at best, with a bit of salt.5 Jonson would have us believe that great comedy can deal with emperors, specific great ones, as well as with the vast panorama of society and that it can bite so hard as to change people.6 What Jonson saw in Shakespeare, I suggest, is an analogously serious comedy that speaks of the actions of leaders and the fates of...