SHAKESPEARE’STRAGEDIES AREMORE SERIOUSTHAN HISCOMEDIES

Myth

9Surely this one is a no-brainer. A story such as King Lear, in which a kingis rejected by his daughters, loses his power, and descends into madnessand then death must be counted more serious than one about the farcicalconfusions ensuing when two sets of twins converge on the same city (TheComedy of Errors) and one of them almost sleeps with the other’s wife.The playwright George Bernard Shaw denounced Shakespeare’s comediesas commercial ‘‘potboilers which he frankly called As You Like It, MuchAdo About Nothing, and What You Will [the alternative title for TwelfthNight].’’1 According to Shaw, then, the very titles of the comedies betraytheir intrinsic superficiality. And it’s not only Shakespeare’s tragedies thatare assumed to be more serious than his comedies, but the two genresthemselves. The nature of tragedy is part of one of the foundationaldocuments of Western culture – Aristotle’s fourth-century BC treatisePoetics, which states that ‘‘tragedy is an imitation of an action thatis serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.’’ No such ur-text ofcomic theory exists, although Umberto Eco’s medieval whodunit TheName of the Rose turns on the existence of Aristotle’s lost tract oncomedy, which Eco imagines as a document feared by the church becauseit gave philosophical backing to comedy’s anti-authoritarian impulses.George Puttenham, writing a manual for would-be poets called TheArte of English Poesie (1589), evaluated the differences between comedyand tragedy in terms that collapse literary, social, and stylistic categories.According to Puttenham, comedies deal with ‘‘common behaviours . . . ofprivate persons, and such as were the meaner sort of men,’’ whereas tragicwriters ‘‘meddled not with so base matters: for they set forth the doleful

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, First Edition. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The tragedies are more serious than the comedies 61

falls of infortunate & afflicted Princes.’’2 Comedy’s ‘‘base matter’’ andits socially inferior protagonists compare unfavorably with the regal and‘‘doleful’’ tragedy.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s tragedies embrace weighty philo-sophical, personal, and political themes. Macbeth, for example, circlesincessantly around issues of guilt and of manliness as it repeatedly posesquestions about who or what is in charge of our actions. Is Macbethdriven by his own ‘‘vaulting ambition’’ (1.7.27), or by the goadingencouragement of his wife, or by the ‘‘supernatural soliciting’’ (1.3.129)of the Weird Sisters? In dramatic form Shakespeare is presenting sig-nificant philosophical debates about agency associated elsewhere withthe writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes. In Julius Caesar, as in RichardII and Richard III, the question is the nature of good rule, and thisinsistent political issue swirls around Shakespeare’s tragedies. It is notsimply because they have further to fall that tragic characters are princesand emperors, but because their actions combine the public and private,and their sphere of influence is the polis rather than the household.Tragedy, wrote the Elizabethan courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, ‘‘openeththe greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered withtissue,’’ and ‘‘maketh kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest theirtyrannical humours.’’3 It’s a picture of tragedy that sees it intimatelyinvolved in anatomizing court corruption, imagined as the ulcer beneaththe skin or rich clothing – a role akin, perhaps, to satire. Hamlet’s play‘‘The Mousetrap’’ would fit Sidney’s definition admirably.

We tend now to value tragedies not because they depict greatmen – Aristotle prescribed that a tragedy must concern ‘‘one who ishighly renowned and prosperous’’ – but rather because they show usmore universal experiences (see Myth 29). That Hamlet is a prince isdownplayed in most modern productions, which often show him, as inRory Kinnear’s portrayal at the National Theatre directed by NicholasHytner in 2010, dressed in a studenty hoody rather than a princelydoublet (see Myth 3). Rather, his appeal is as a man struggling withgrief at the death of his father, and with his own place in a familial andsocial structure after that life-changing event. Similarly, that Lear is aking seems irrelevant compared with his role as father and as a manlosing his powers as he ages: the politics of the union of the kingdomsand the parable of the dangers of national division which spoke to KingJames’s unionist aspirations when the play was first performed have losttheir edge. Again, the relationship between husband and wife in Macbethseems important to us in psychological terms and the ‘‘barren sceptre’’(3.1.63) that haunts their marriage is freighted more with emotionalthan political and dynastic resonance. Shakespeare’s tragedies occupy

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particular life-stages and achieve a wider significance through the echoesof his characters’ experiences, if not their social situation, in his audiences.

That Shakespeare’s tragedies obviously address serious and significantthemes in public and private life need not mean that his comedies arecorrespondingly insubstantial: Shaw’s dismissal of the comedies as vacu-ously populist needs some modification. The later twentieth century hastaught us that comedy and its physiological response, laughter, are neitherneutral nor benign, but expressive of violent and dominating energies.Unacceptable, aggressive, or sexual desires are sublimated in telling jokes,Freud asserts in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).Consider the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to which the loversescape from the repression of Athenian life: like the joke itself, this spaceoffers a release which is both comic and terrifying. Performances oftendouble the repressed Athenian rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with theirfairy counterparts Oberon and Titania, making the passionate dispute inthe woodland world which disrupts the ‘‘mazed world’’ (2.1.113) intothe expressive obverse – perhaps the unconscious – of Theseus’s winninghis Amazonian bride ‘‘doing thee injuries’’ (1.1.17). Dark, dangerousdesires can be rehearsed in the frightening freedom of the wood: dreams,as Hermia finds when in sleep ‘‘methought a serpent ate my heart away,/ And you sat smiling at his cruel prey’’ (2.2.155–6), are full of whatShakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Nashe called ‘‘the terrors of thenight’’: Nashe proposes that there is ‘‘no such figure of the first chaoswhereout the world was extraught [extracted] as our dreams in thenight. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded, and meettogether.’’4 An influential book by the Polish theater director Jan Kottdescribed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, often considered an innocent,rustic depiction of a fairy world and a play particularly suitable for chil-dren, as Shakespeare’s ‘‘most truthful, brutal and violent play’’ in whichsexual desire is violently dehumanized in the interchangeability of thelovers and the animal transformation of Bottom; Kott’s vision lay behindPeter Brook’s landmark production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon,which stripped the conventional rustic frou-frou from the staging and setthe play on swinging trapezes in a white-painted box.5

In Shakespeare’s plays we tend to be encouraged to laugh at (Dogberry’sverbal mix-ups in Much Ado About Nothing, Malvolio’s cross-gartersin Twelfth Night), rather than with: such laughter is, as the philosopherThomas Hobbes put it a half-century after Shakespeare, an attack ofself-satisfaction, either of pleasure in ‘‘some sudden act’’ of one’s own,or ‘‘the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparisonwhereof [we] suddenly applaud ourselves.’’6 ‘‘Laughter,’’ writes HenriBergson at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘‘is a corrective.’’7

In showing us our own aggression, comedy is a serious business, based

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on a complicated form of recognition and on forms of social control.Shakespeare did not, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, leave us anytheoretical writings on drama, so perhaps Jonson’s own description ofcomedy showing ‘‘an image of the times,’’ showing ‘‘human follies’’rather than ‘‘crimes’’ – ‘‘such errors as you’ll all confess / By laughingat them, they deserve no less’’ (Every Man in His Humour, 1598) – canstand in.

Comedies can thus deal with serious themes. Let’s look again at TheComedy of Errors, the apparently light and farcical play cited at thehead of this myth as the fall-guy to King Lear’s evident superiority inseriousness. Like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors is deeply concernedwith questions of identity and selfhood. Just as Lear descends intomadness when his daughters Goneril and Regan do not acknowledgehim as their father, so too the twin Antipholuses and Dromios enter aworld of madness when they are repeatedly mistaken for one another. AsAdriana, wife to his brother, berates him for his lack of care to her, thebewildered Antipholus of Syracuse wonders ‘‘what error drives our eyesand ears amiss?’’ (2.2.187). Error here has a stronger connotation thanour modern sense of ‘‘mistake’’: it is, as in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’sepic The Faerie Queene (1590), a terrifying condition of spiritual andintellectual wandering (from the Latin verb errare, to wander astray).When Antipholus of Ephesus returns to his own house only to have hisway barred by a servant telling him he cannot enter because he is alreadyinside at dinner, the comedy of mistaken identity becomes an existentialexploration: how do we know we are ourselves, if those nearest tous do not recognize us or if they tell us we are someone other thanwe believe ourselves to be? John Mortimer’s observation that ‘‘farce istragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute’’8 is appropriate toThe Comedy of Errors: while the tragedies may approach similar themesthey do so in a more consciously dilated and reflective way, whereas thecomedy hurtles through the same difficult territory at breakneck speed.

To take another example of the overlap between comic and tragictreatments of the same theme: in both genres Shakespeare depicts thedestructive effect of male sexual jealousy. In Much Ado About Nothing,Claudio is persuaded by the malevolent Don John that his bride-to-beHero has been unfaithful on her wedding night, and he denounces herpublicly. In Othello Iago works on the credulous Othello to make himbelieve his wife Desdemona is a ‘‘lewd minx’’ (3.3.478). Despite thefact that both women are the blameless victims of male rivalry andmanipulation, death is their punishment. In Hero’s case, it is a fakeddeath but one which nevertheless has the force of ritual purgation.Reconciled with Claudio at the end of the play she tells him that ‘‘OneHero died defiled, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid’’

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(5.4.63–4). For Desdemona there is no such ‘‘resurrection’’: althoughshe revives briefly in the bed on which her husband has smothered her,it is only to acquit him of blame for her murder. The theme is takenup again in one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, The Winter’s Tale.This play belongs to a group of Jacobean comedies whose combinationof generic elements, use of the fantastical or supernatural, and moreextended chronologies across generations mean they are often called‘‘romances.’’ In it Leontes, the King of Sicilia, becomes convinced thathis wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes. He putsher on trial for treacherous adultery and banishes the child he believesa bastard, but when the Delphic oracle brands him a ‘‘jealous tyrant’’(3.2.133) and both Hermione and his son Mamillius die, he repents,acknowledges ‘‘our shame perpetual,’’ and vows that ‘‘tears . . . shall bemy recreation’’ (3.2.238–9). So far, so Othello. But the difference hereis that the play is not over. Leontes is a tragic character who is notallowed the comfort of suicide – like Othello – and a jealous characterwho is not permitted timely resolution – like Claudio. He has to livewith his terrible mistakes. A comic, pastoral second half, set after asixteen-year gap, sees the courtship of Perdita – the lost child of Leontesand Hermione – by Florizel – son of Polixenes. This new couple are toheal the breach in their parents’ generation. Back in Sicilia, the familyis reunited, and, wonder of wonders, Hermione is returned to life. Thisfinal treatment of male jealousy goes beyond tragedy, and shows us thatwhat is on the other side is a version of comedy, ending in marriageand reconciliation. As elsewhere in his career, it seems that Shakespeare’scommitment is less to the differences between comedy and tragedy thanto their continuities and overlaps. As Dr Johnson put it, ‘‘Shakespearehas united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in onemind but in one composition.’’9

Notes

1 Edwin Wilson (ed.), Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’sWritings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Pen-guin, 1969), p. 79.

2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and AliceWalker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 25–6.

3 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or The Defence of Poesy, ed. GeoffreyShepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), p. 117.

4 www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf (page 11, accessed 18February 2012).

5 Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 178.

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6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), p. 43.

7 Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900), trans. F. Rothwell as Laughter, in Wylie Sypher(ed.), Comedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 74.

8 Georges Feydeau, A Flea in Her Ear, trans. John Mortimer (Old Vic theaterprogram, 1986).

9 Quoted in Emma Smith (ed.), Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Shakespeare’sTragedies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 19.