Shakespearean Comedy

To speak of “Shakespearean comedy” is to speak of more than just the 12 plays of William Shakespeare that resolve temporary problems more or less happily into social, family, or marital union, as comedy usually does. In any account of Shakespearean comedy, it is also important to consider the humorous elements throughout his work, for example in the histories of Henry IV (Parts I and II, 1596–1598) and Henry V (1599) and in his most famous tragedies, Hamlet (1600), Othello (1603), Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606), where humorous characters and situations provide comic relief from the intense tragic action unfolding all around. Alongside the 12 well-recognized comedies, Shakespeare’s first editors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who put together the First Folio (1623), also included in their list of his comedies two late plays, The Winter’s Tale (1609) and The Tempest (1610), which are commonly regarded as “romances,” along with two others, Pericles (1607) and Cymbeline (1610). The fact that Heminges and Condell included those two romances indicates just how much Shakespeare’s handling of romance draws on the convention of comedy that the plot denouement should dissolve a play’s conflicts and tensions. Such categorizing also indicates just how much that particular plot arrangement was thought to define comedy. “Comedy” in Shakespeare’s cultural world, which was so greatly influenced by Aristotle, was, once again, very much defined by both plot construction and humor.

Shakespeare’s comic plots and preferred forms of humor draw especially on the Roman writers of comedy, Plautus and Terrence, and the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte but develop a distinct style of their own that goes well beyond straight farce and verbal wit. Particularly important sources are Plautus’s plays Mostellaria, Menaechmi, and, to a lesser extent, Amphitruo, and Rudens. Shakespeare takes from such plays and the commedia dell’arte the comic elements of trickery, disguise, confusion, master-slave tension, checked desire, tokens such as rings that bring recognition and plot resolution, and stereotypical comic characters such as the senex (old man) who locks up his daughter to prevent young men from getting at her and the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) whose unbounded pride usually ends with a good comeuppance. Some of these are the elements of pure farce. Shakespeare takes them and gives them a decidedly romantic cast, both in the sense that he embeds characters with farcical roots in plots driven by the quest for marital consummation of romantic love and also in the sense that his comic plots often tilt toward the genre of romance in their semitragic endings and supernatural interventions. For that reason, Shakespearean comedy often feels quite distinct from the highly satirical cast of the comedies of his contemporary Ben Jonson (1572–1637). The romantic shape of Shakespearean comedy also involves a significant role for the “witty woman,” who, in many plays, is instrumental in bringing about the necessary resolution to the plot’s complications.

Critics have also pointed out that the materiality of the Roman stage had an influence on its comedy and thus on the comedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For example, the doors onto the proscaenium (stage) were often used to represent oppositions between competing moralities, families, or urban spaces. Shakespeare’s oppositions of place, such as Athens and the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—perhaps draw on this aspect of Roman comedy.

...