The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies (review)

This is a fluent, agile introduction to the comedies, accessible to nonspecialists without being condescending. Penny Gay manages a nice mixture of narration and theoretical awareness, bringing her readers into contact with fairly sophisticated contemporary approaches while avoiding the hard words. Her primary emphasis is on how gender and the broader social issues of a patriarchal society interact with comic form. What students will find particularly handy is the way she sketches in the genre traditions and contexts behind each of the comedies and its characters before proceeding with her own lively thumbnail analyses. Like many recent critics, Gay highlights the role of actors as theatrical entertainers moving with various degrees of freedom between locus and platea, stressing "each play's overall effect as a story told in the theatre" (14; emphases added).

Chapter 1 lays the conceptual groundwork for what follows, exploring the relationship between comedy as laughter and comedy as narrative form or structure. Latin and Italian comedy and the commedia dell'arte, together with the comedies of Lyly and Peele of the 1580s, are taken as Shakespeare's structural models, hybridized with the English vernacular tradition to form that "mongrel," "indecorous" (7) tradition of drama in which Shakespeare's imagination thrived. Focusing on clowns as commentators and boy actors as cross-dressers, Gay gives prominence to the self-conscious metatheatricality with which their characters are endowed and how the London stages fostered such liminality. Faced with the nightmare prospect of cramming an account of modern comic theory into a couple of pages, Gay understandably confines herself to reviewing the anthropological approaches of Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber. But as she is quick to point out, reading the plays in terms of community rituals of inclusion was problematized by the feminist and new historicist criticism of the 1980s and 1990s that drew attention to elements of rupture and discontinuity in the aesthetic experience, even of the festive comedies.

The following chapters present the plays in rough chronological order, grouped by genre. This leads to occasional strains in both periodization and generic packaging: in chapter 2 ("Farce"), the later Merry Wives of Windsor rubs shoulders with The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, while in chapter 3 ("Courtly Lovers and the Real World"), The Merchant of Venice sits rather uncomfortably alongside Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Still, it is an arrangement that enables Gay to give a sense of Shakespeare's ongoing experiments in dramatic form, and there is no easy alternative to it. The chapters vary in structure, with sections centering now on single characters ("Kaiser Falstaff ") or character types ("the witty heroine"), now on themes ("courtly language and gender," "pastoral ideal vs. political violence"), now on structural elements ("the frame," "endings") according to their relevance to a particular comedy. Specific sections are devoted to clown roles in many of the plays, in keeping with the book's emphasis on the farcical dimension and the importance of liminal figures with one foot in the fictional world and the other in Shoreditch or Southwark. Love's Labor's Lost gets chapter 4 ("Comedy and Language") all to itself, enabling Gay to expand on the relations between courtly rhetoric, popular wit, and gender. Chapter 5 ("Romantic Comedy"), chronologically and generically the tidiest, groups together Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, showcasing the eloquent heroines Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola who "talk, in their very different styles, as no dramatic heroine has talked before" (72). Chapter 6 ("Problematic Plots and Endings") rounds off the survey by (aptly) stringing together the "problem comedies" Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well with the "late romances" The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Oddly, given the author's keen eye for traditions of dramatic form, no reference is made to the vogue for the tragicomic genre sparked by the 1602 English translation of Guarini's...