William Shakespeare: Shakespearean Comedy
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Aristotle defines Comedy as
"A mixture of men worse than the average, worse ever not as regards any or every sort of fault, but only as regard one particular kind, the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others."
Most of Shakespeare's comedies are the comedies of Romance or Romantic Comedies. Their main characteristics are-
a- They are set in natural surroundings. The important scenes in them are of nature as opposed to the city. For example, the scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in a wood near Athens; of Twelfth Night it is the seacoast town with flowering gardens; of Much Ado About Nothing", the orchard surroundings; and the forest of Arden for As You Like It. Athens, Illyria, Messina, and France, where the scenes of these comedies are laid respectively, carry the mind beyond the ordinary city atmosphere of the theatre to a different age and a different locality. Shakespeare deliberately devised these scenes because he wanted to conjure up an atmosphere suitable to the characters and the emotions of his plays.
b- The characters in these comedies are more or less realistically drawn so that they reflect the manners and types of Elizabethan England. In the Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch does not belong to Illyria, but to England, nor Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream is a citizen of Athens.
c- The unified effect is produced in these comedies by the utilization of humour rather than of wit, and therefore, this type of comedy may also be rightly called the Comedy of Humour, though this title is not deliberately given to it because it creates confusion with the satiric comedy of Ben Johnson, which is rather erroneously called the comedy of 'humour'. In the early romantic comedies of Shakespeare, there is a preponderance of humor, which creates that romantic atmosphere of emotion, willing to be deceived and not overcritical. There is also a deliberate effort on the part of Shakespeare to keep the coloring soft and produce a subdued tone. The wit in Rosalind in As You Like It is mellowed and chastened. It is not given a free play and is made to appeal to the feelings. Moreover, In spite of her wit, Rosalind is emotional rather than intellectual. In the Twelfth Night, it is love and not wit which binds together Viola, Olivia, and the Duke. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedict and Beatrice crack jokes about marriage, but they are emotional rather than witty characters. It is, in fact, this element of humor in the comedies of Shakespeare, which harmonizes scenes and characters. The humor is meditative, fanciful and kindly, and romantic in its essence on account of its rich glow of a sentiment that is half poetical and half whimsical. It is because of this type of humor that these comedies of romance appeal to our meditative faculties and our emotions. The laughter which this humor gives rise to is subdued into a kind of feeling if contentment, and it gives us the happiness of spirit rather than an outburst of outward merriment.
d- In these romantic comedies, there is also an element of evil or misfortune. All along we knew that this evil is vanquished and that the misfortunes will disappear, but it is ever present before us throughout the greater part of the plot. In As You Like It, this evil consists in the banishment of the duke and his daughter; in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it consists of the hopeless entangling of the lover's passions, and the threat of execution that hangs over them; In the Twelfth Night, the fatal neglect of Viola gives rise to evil; and in Much Ado About Nothing, the casting off of Hero by Claudius leads to misfortune. In As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the evil and misfortune are softened by Rosalind's happy temperament and Viola's cheerfulness respectively. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing, the evil is softened by the mirth of certain characters (Luck and Bottom in Midsummer and Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado) who though connected with the unfortunate characters, yet stand apart with them. It is on account of this fact that these comedies, in spite of a persistent element of evil in them, cannot be called tragi-comedies.
In the plays of Shakespeare's last years- Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest the romantic element is still more stressed. Instead of setting the scene in France, Athens, and Illyria, in these plays it is carried even further in ancient Britain or Bohemia or an island in the Barmoothes. Moreover, to correspond with the highly improbable nature of the settings, the incidents are made still more improbable and 'romantic'. Whereas in the early romantic comedies Shakespeare struck a balance between idealism and reality, in these later plays, there is a loss of reality, all together in the scene and in the situation, and partly in character. Moreover, the tragic and serious elements which were subdued and occupied a subordinate position in earlier comedies, are deeply stressed, so that these plays are no longer pure comedies, but a mixture of tragedy and comedies. This heightened romantic note and increased tragic element are the main characteristics of these later plays of Shakespeare as well those of Beaumont and Fletcher. There is also in these plays a greater element of intrigue which is more involved and takes the form of evil lacking in the earlier plays.
These later plays of Shakespeare belong to the same category of Romantic Comedy, as the earlier comedy, but these two groups of plays are so sharply distinguished that they may be considered as quite separate sub-species of the one type i.e, Romantic Comedy.