Shakespeare Comedies

What defines or characterises a comedy in this context?

I can’t help but think about Shakespeare’s own suspicion of genre categories. I will quote Hamlet for you, because for me everything gets oriented around that play. A troupe of players is coming to Elsinore, and Polonius praises them as “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” – Shakespeare is aware of and having a gentle laugh at our commitment to dramatic categories.

But genre definitions are important. Generic expectations both orient us and allow us to be surprised. Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited a definition that comedy was “the imitation of life, the glass of custom, and the image of truth.” They also knew the Aristotelian distinction between comedy and tragedy, which traffics in figures who are greater or more admirable than we are. Comedies focus on characters closer to our own station, who are absorbed in the activities of daily life, and who face obstacles that block their practical goals or romantic desires. So a compact definition of comedy is drama that sets its characters in difficult situations, runs them through various dilemmas and complications, and resolves those complications in ways that afford new possibilities for family, community, and belonging.

Could we say something about the categories in the 1623 collection of his plays, the First Folio?

Yes. The title page of the Folio reads: ‘Master William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies’. Shakespeare’s fellows and compilers are also committed to generic distinctions. The first play in the Folio is The Tempest, which is today considered a romance rather than a comedy. In the Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, I explain why we now label The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline in this way. But it’s worth reminding your readers that they were grouped in the comedies in Shakespeare’s time, although we’ve plucked them apart.

It’s almost cruel to ask a Shakespeare scholar to pick the best five of any kind of Shakespeare play. What criteria have you used to pick your plays today?

It was indeed painful. To make it easier, I used the concept of “best for”: I asked myself what plays I enjoy most, and what I think other readers and viewers would enjoy most – but then added the qualifier, “best for doing X”. In this way, I made explicit what audiences often do with Shakespeare: make his works and language serve different purposes. I’m always very conscious of Shakespeare’s line in The Merchant of Venice, “the devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” As our “secular scripture,” Shakespeare is available for different uses.

Great, let’s talk about your first choice. What is The Comedy of Errors best for?

This is best for starting a semester with an undergraduate class. I’m a professor at the University of Tennessee, and I teach a wide range of classes. One of my favourites to teach is an introduction to Shakespeare. Students in this course are usually not English majors, but they need an arts and humanities credit or a writing concentration class for their general education requirements.

I love this play as a starting point for students. It itself is an early play, a “beginning” for Shakespeare. It has a seemingly tidy structure – it obeys Aristotelian unities of time and place – but it opens up into a chaotic world of errors – wanderings, mistakes, misapprehensions of self and other. It’s one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, but it contains in little all the concerns he takes up with more consistency in later comedies and tragedies.

Great. Tell us about the story.

It’s a plot of mistaken identity. Two sets of twins inhabit the city of Ephesus, but they don’t know that the other set is there. That’s the source of much of the laughter, as the audience knows that the twins were separated some twenty-five years earlier, and that one set has been sailing across the Mediterranean in search of the other set. The situation becomes a rich ground for Shakespeare to dramatize family relationships (particularly relevant for a play whose setting is the same as Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians): between husband and wife, parent and child, and sibling and sibling. The relationships play out against a background of global commerce, as Ephesus is an active port city, and it’s in a trade war with Syracuse, the home of one of the sets of twins. My students are very alert to the idea that the play is about, among other things, migration and immigration.

Shakespeare took the basic plot from Plautus’s Menaechmi, a classical Latin play, and he enriched it by doubling the sets of twins – in Plautus there’s only one set, a merchant and the sibling searching for him. Shakespeare gives each twin, both named Antipholus – I know, it’s very confusing – a companion named Dromio, who is really their servant or slave. The addition of the Dromios puts new emphasis on the unsettling dynamics between masters and servants. Shakespeare also extends the story of husband and wife that he gets from Plautus, paying special attention to Antipholus of Ephesus’s wife, Adriana, and her fears and jealousies. My students – and surely audiences generally – are always taken with the plight of Adriana, who is so preoccupied by the possibility that her husband is cheating that she mistakes his twin for him. Shakespeare also frames the story of the Antipholi twins with that of their father, Egeon, who, as a Syracusan, has been imprisoned in Ephesus and faces execution.

The play is tied to the sea. We learn in the play’s first act that the sets of twins, along with Egeon and his wife, were separated by a shipwreck, and all the characters are concerned with setting sail, whether to escape Ephesus or to continue their trading ventures. So the language is infused by a maritime sensibility, and its most striking metaphors are spoken by characters who compare themselves to water drops.

This is the earliest play on your list. In the introduction to your Handbook, you mention that it will refute the developmental model, that the plays go from more joyful to more ironic over time… Is this a joyful play?

Yes, I think that’s a fair assessment. The endings of Shakespeare’s comedies are always complicated, with festivity and joy punctuated with melancholy or uncertainty. Comedy of Errors is almost entirely celebratory: after all the farcical mishaps of the first four acts, the twins are reunited with their siblings, Egeon is reunited with his long-lost wife, Antipholus of Syracuse gains a wife, the sister of Adriana, and Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus at least seem reconciled. We know realistically that the happy ending cannot compensate for the many years the families have been separated, nor can it undo the beatings we have seen the Dromios sustain, but we can participate in the fantasy resolution and the way the play, in the language of Ephesians, has “redeemed the time.”

What I refer to in the Handbook is the finding of many of my contributors: that all Shakespeare’s comedies are vulnerable to a tragic turn. This potential inheres in the language and depends on performance. Taming of the Shrew is not on my list, but that’s an early play in which the ending – when Katherine seems to submit to her husband – can be performed in a number of ways. It can be played as though her deference to her husband is a sign that she has been entirely broken by him, or it can be played as though she is slyly mimicking what he’d like her to say. Or the actors can perform the conclusion with a shared aplomb, so that Katherine and Petruchio seem to be collaborating in a joke. So much depends on performance.

Let’s look at your second choice now: Measure for Measure – which is debatable, but listed as a comedy in the Folio…

I would put Measure and Merchant together under the heading of ‘problem plays.’ The term ‘problem play’ does not come up in the Hamlet list. It’s a modern invention. But it does name what you were gesturing to before – their endings feel far from resolved, and they leave us in the uncomfortable position of watching characters who remain alienated, outside the communal circle, on the edge of a tragedy. In Measure, the focus of the ending is on Isabella, who starts the play hoping to become a nun. She is forced to leave the convent and, at the end of the play, receives silently what seems like an inescapable marriage proposal from a man who has deceived her. I’ve seen one performance in which this whole experience absolutely shatters her. It’s easy even just reading the play to note the painful ending, but to see her silence at the end performed as traumatic brokenness feels very different.

In the Folio of 1623, Measure is listed as a comedy, and it is a comedy in form — it begins with a complicated political and domestic situation which it resolves by bringing multiple couples together. But its substance is dark; it feels much more driven by the spectre of death than the promise of pleasure.

Interesting. What’s it best for?

It’s best for talking about what the play calls the “properties of government”: the relationship of the state to its subjects, the shapes that tyranny takes, and the role of sexuality in contemporary politics and religion. Its combination of politics, sex and religion – really its combination of political and sexual abuse — is so pertinent for our own moment, as it was for Shakespeare’s. The play interrogates what it means to be in a position of power and to be a subject of that power.

Tell us a little about the plot.

Duke Vincentio is Duke of Vienna, and he’s worried that his city has become disorderly and unruly, and he blames himself for being too lax in enforcing the laws. His way of solving this problem is to pretend to leave Vienna and to place his deputy, Angelo, in charge, as a kind of “bad cop.” Vincentio dons the disguise of a friar, so he can hide behind the scenes and observe what happens to his city in his absence. He thus witnesses the licence not only of his citizens but also of the seemingly puritanical Angelo.

Angelo, in his effort to instil order, wants to execute Claudio, Isabella’s brother, for fornication (sex outside of marriage). When Isabella, having left the convent, pleads to Angelo on Claudio’s behalf, Angelo makes an indecent proposal: if Isabella will sleep with him, he’ll free her brother.  The proposal makes crystal clear that chastity, the condition of a patriarchal sexual and political economy, inflames the desire of a seemingly chaste man. So that’s the set up.

It certainly seems set for tragedy.

And I haven’t even gotten into the news we learn later that Angelo has abandoned a former lover when she lost her dowry. And that Duke Vincentio knew about this. But as it’s a comedy, we’ve got to rescue everybody from Angelo’s obscene demand.

The play becomes even more problematic when Isabella goes to her brother to tell him what has happened, expecting that he will be willing to die rather than she be forced to have sex with Angelo. But when he does imply that he wants her to do that, she is outraged to the point that she promises to “pray a thousand prayers for thy death.” Her response is another element of the problem play: the postulant turns on her brother with the same viciousness and the same literal-mindedness that the false deputy Angelo uses against her.

Your third choice we’ve already touched on as a good partner for Measure. Tell us about The Merchant of Venice.

Yes. This play too is relevant to our contemporary moment, addressing religious and racial difference. Religion and race are intimately associated in Shakespeare’s time, as both are understood to inhere in the blood as well as the skin.

I can quickly remind folks that Antonio is the merchant of the title, not Shylock, the Jew and best-known character. Antonio is a Christian merchant, and he agrees to take on the burden of a loan on behalf of his friend Bassanio, whom he secretly adores – it’s a relationship that various scholars have seen as either explicitly or implicitly homoerotic. The loan will enable Bassanio to woo Portia, and Antonio agrees to a bond with Shylock for 3,000 ducats. The bond stipulates that if Antonio cannot pay his debt, Shylock is entitled to “a pound of your fair flesh” (the scholar Ian Smith has paid attention to “fairness” as a signal of racial and religious difference here).

Antonio can’t repay the debt on time. Shylock, furious at the fact that his daughter has eloped with a Christian, demands his pound of flesh. The case comes to trial in front of the cross-dressed Portia, Bassanio’s beloved, who is disguised as a judge. She asks Shylock to be merciful, but when he refuses to give up the bond, she awards him his pound of flesh. Just as Shylock approaches Antonio, however, she warns him not to spill any blood and not to take “a jot” more than a single pound. Which is impossible to do, so the tables are turned on Shylock. He’s accused of threatening the life of a Christian and Portia rules that he must convert and relinquish his possessions.

A mixed ending indeed…

You can hear the devastating anti-Jewish tropes operating here. Shylock is presented as the bloodthirsty villain who wants to kill the martyr-like Antonio.

But at the same time as it traffics in these anti-Jewish tropes, the play also gives space and language to Shylock’s suffering and humanity. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” he asks, a question that seems directed not only to the other characters but to the audience. The play walks a tightrope between the particularism associated with the Jew, and the universalist claims of the Christian. Nobody talks about this better than Janet Adelman in a book called Blood Relations, which addresses the Christian characters’ own sense of their inheritance from a Jewish tradition, and their need to reject and separate from it.

At the same time, the figure of the Jew can be seen to stand in for a number of other outsiders. In Protestant England, for instance, Catholics were compared to Jews.  Emma Smith suggests that Shylock can be read as a stand-in for economic and religious migrants in London. From this perspective, Shylock’s plea makes the play “best for” acknowledging claims to a shared humanity. I think Shakespeare has captured something about a uniquely Jewish experience of historic marginalization in this play. But it’s important, particularly in this moment when anti-Semitism has been so weaponized, to extend Shylock’s powerful claim to the voices of other groups or peoples. I say this as somebody who is Jewish.

This brings us to The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, where all the essays are framed around the theme of ‘encounter’. I can see now how fertile that would be. We’ve talked about sexual and gendered encounters, racial and religious encounters… Did the theme come first and shape the essays, or vice versa?

It felt to me like we needed to have some organising principle for the volume, especially because the editors did not want individual chapters on each play. That really put pressure on me to think of ways to bring plays together in units of two or three or even four. I have to give tonnes of credit to my contributors who did that synthesizing work under the broad banner of an encounter in extraordinary ways. One example that I was especially surprised by is by John Parker, who put together Comedy of Errors, Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor under the heading of “holy adultery.” And Catherine Richardson did wonderful work on domestic encounters in her chapter.

‘Encounter’ also allowed me to get at a major concern of contemporary scholarship: the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays embrace the globe. And I mean the globe of geography and cosmography, although we should mention the Globe Theatre too. The language of ‘encounter’ speaks to early modern exploration and international contact, and using it allowed the volume to thematize the ways Shakespeare’s comedies travel across such a wide swath of the world. It’s worth just re-listing the locales of the comedies I’ve discussed: Vienna, Venice, Ephesus…

Also, as somebody invested in psychoanalysis, I relied on the idea of encounter as a prompt to focus on intimate relationships. So, as much as the theme gave contributors purchase on global Shakespeare, it also enabled us to talk about the one-to-one interactions in the plays.

Well, that brings us very nicely to your next choice, which certainly features some beloved one-to-one encounters: what is Much Ado About Nothing best for?

This is best for navigating the thin line between war and sex or violence and love.

A group of soldiers return from war to Messina, Sicily.  The backdrop of armed battle sets up a battle of the sexes. The best known– or as you say, beloved — of these battles is between the characters Beatrice and Benedick, the model couple of witty romantic banter. But there are other battles of the sexes. Claudio falls in love with Hero, but allows his leader, Don Pedro, to woo her on his behalf. We thus see a kind of “battle” develop between Claudio and Hero but also between Claudio and Don Pedro over Hero. The villainous Don John exploits this situation, convincing Claudio that Hero has been unfaithful so that he rejects her at the altar. The characters get fooled by the very traps they set in order to pursue their love objects. And the women bear the burden of the traps. The triumph of the play is that Benedick gives up his masculine ties to defend Hero and Beatrice.

Much Ado marks the height of Shakespeare’s work with the clown Will Kemp, who plays the linguistically challenged constable Dogberry (he’s always using words incorrectly). Dogberry and his comrades discover that Don John has manufactured the claim against Hero. As his partner-in-crime Borachio notes, “What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.” That is the source of comic delight: the lowly Dogberry sees, despite himself, through the masquerades and plots of the high-born courtiers.

The clown raises an interesting point – we haven’t touched on the more standard modern meaning of a comedy: something funny. Will we still be laughing at these plays?

That is a great question. I should hope so. Good performances bring to life the plays’ rich range of puns, jokes, and farcical scenes. And the tension that we have been discussing, between the serious and the humorous, only heightens the moments of release and laughter.

In the Handbook, Jeremy Lopez’s ‘Imagining Shakespeare’s Audience’ historicizes comedy by suggesting how certain characters – often in smaller parts – help direct the audience to laugh, as if they were teaching playgoers to recognize what is funny.

I do think that Shakespeare’s comedies, both then and now, insist that we stay alert to what makes us laugh, and to the possibility that we laugh at the expense of another person. Shakespeare does this by constructing inset plays, so that the off-stage audience can watch the on-stage audience as a kind of mirror for what they’re doing in the moment. That might take us on to Twelfth Night and the duping of Malvolio…

Your fifth choice. Tell us about Twelfth Night, and then we’ll come back to this question of comedy.

This is another shipwreck play and another twin play, so we are coming full circle with Comedy of Errors. It’s best for studying the shapes of human desire. I’ll give you a quick synopsis…

The shipwrecked comic heroine Viola puts on the disguise of a page boy named Cesario to serve Orsino, the Count of Illyria. Viola is of course played, like all other female characters in Shakespeare’s time, by a boy actor, so there’s a layering or implicating of gender identities from the second scene. Viola – at once she, he, they – ends up in a love triangle. Orsino sends Viola/Cesario to woo Olivia on his behalf; Olivia falls in love with Viola, whom she thinks is Cesario; and Viola/Cesario is in love with Orsino. This triangle is matched by another one, with a homoerotic twist: Antonio adores Sebastian, Viola’s supposedly lost twin brother, while Olivia and Sebastian pair off.

These triangles seem conventional now, but they completely destabilise these characters’ worlds. Willingly or unwillingly, they inhabit different ‘subject positions’ – different ways of perceiving and responding to the world than they are used to. For our own times, the play speaks to the fluidity and fragility of sexual and gender orientations.

I want to call attention to a line that Viola/Cesario offers: she’s distressed at the effects of her disguise, and she says, “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness.” Here she’s echoing the language of anti-theatricalists – those critics of the theatre in Shakespeare’s time who were concerned about it in the same way that people now are concerned when they don’t like video games. They maintained that if you see a play, you’re going to act like what you see. So she’s a pre-modern critic of acting, and yet she continues to perform; and it’s by performing that she becomes increasingly self-aware. I think that’s one of the things we appreciate in her playing both Viola and Cesario at the same time, and inhabiting these different identities.

Another very relevant play. And it links back to the question of our implication in the comedy?

Twelfth Night is so meta-dramatic – it calls attention to itself as a work of theatre by creating internal plays. Mariah and Sir Toby trick the character Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, to get back at him for aspiring above his class position in a condescending way. They plot to convince Malvolio that Olivia is in love with him, and they use his response to humiliate him. Their “play” is a joke on, but also a punishment of, Malvolio. In fact, there’s a great line where Sir Toby says, “Come, we’ll have him in a dark room and bound… We may carry it thus, for our pleasure and his penance”. So we learn here that our laughter and delight, like Toby and Mariah’s, is often at the cost of somebody else – he’s being punished while we’re taking pleasure in it.

We delight in these plays. We should delight in them. They are meant to give us access to shared experiences. But I do think there’s a little voice behind the scenes that’s saying, just know that you’re complicit in this.

The self-recognition in comedy is so important. If tragedy is leading you to a catharsis, the purging of pity and fear – if you go back to the Aristotelian definitions – then comedy should make you aware of what you’re laughing at. Or, in my Handbook’s terms, aware of your encounters.