A BACKGROUND STUDY OF SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY

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Characteristics of Shakespearean Comedy

A fundamental quality of Shakespearean comedies is that emphasis is laid on situation than character development. Shakespearean comedies enable us to laugh at human ignorance arising from crisis of identity and self – deception. A major theme handled by Shakespearean comedies is love tangle. We usually find a situation where a character pines for someone who pines for another. Love is portrayed in perplexing ways:

sometimes we find it as “rainbows and butterflies”, sometimes we find it tyrannical, inhuman and painful. Nothing can be as painful as losing one’s sleep for someone who does not even know that one exists.

Nevertheless, in Shakespearean comedies, there is always a movement towards the “green world”. No matter the complexity of conflict, confusion and tension, events usually gravitate to happy ending, with marriage of hearts. According to Brocket and Hildy, in Shakespearean comedies:

A number of plots are usually interwoven, at first proceeding somewhat independently of each other but eventually coming together as denouement approaches, so that the resolution of one leads to that of the others; in this way apparent diversity is given unity.

Deception is a glaring quality of Shakespearean comedies. In virtually all his comic plays, the playwright exploits all known forms of deception such as mistaken identity, forgery, and disguise, to deepen the problem of love tangle. Other means of extracting laughter such as pun, humour, slapstick action and wit – bantering are employed by Shakespeare in his comedies to promote the humans love for the trivia. Most of these qualities are ignited and enlivened by fools like Feste in Twelfth Night.

Shakespearean comedies exploit the technique of separation and unification. The separation is normally caused by a tragic incident like shipwreck, while the unification is produced by the element of chance.

All Shakespearean comedies move towards the green world and usually end in festivals and marriages. The atmosphere is optimistic no matter the amount of conflicts and crises characters passed through. Overall, Fletcher observes that in his comedies, Shakespeare:

Scoffs merrily at conceit, bombast, vanity, and worldly folly. What emerges more and more, as one reads and thinks, is the wisdom and knowledge of the man combined with his gift of poetry. These qualities have lifted him into eminence. He could make words mean more than they logically mean, and express such commonplace emotions as young lovers, sorrow, despair, and ambition, in a radiant kind of language so that these experiences seem not commonplace but the very essence of romance, adventure, pathos.

Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night has been mostly agreed to be the summit of Shakespearean comedy. Rich in gender – crossing disguise, separation and unification of identical twins and loved ones, self-inflation, shipwreck, pun and wit-bantering, etc, the play’s carefully arranged multi-situational events, makes its universe quite riveting. The universe of the play is unstable because there is constant movement from light to the mysterious; from longing to absurd trivia and nonsense talk about sex. In “Notes on Twelfth Night”, Serban (1999) observes that through the play Shakespeare compels us to see “the flow of images of life as a reflection of reality that is always shifting. Nothing is what it seems’. In fact, he submits that:

The play makes us question what we think we know about love, sexuality, relationships, gender – it gives us a sense of humility and recognition that we are celebrating on stage, forces that we know very little about. Like characters caught in a net, we wonder what is missing in our experience of love. Physical love, spiritual love, tyrannical or compassionate love, between friends – tornado of forces, the cravings, fears are a manifestation of our divided beings longing for unity.

The Theme of Love Tangle

Twelfth Night examines the romantic theme of love tangle in an intriguing way. Although the play is regarded by many people as a romance, it is not as we have said “a comedy of complete lightheartedness” (Oppapers.com). In spite of the fact that there is a friendly love between Antonio and Sebastin as well as between Sebastin and Viola, yet for most of the characters, love appears tyrannical, a very painful experience. We discover that even while “the music rumbles”, Orsino who had fallen in love with Olivia at first sight, pines for her but she does not want to listen to him.

Olivia faces similar experience when Cesario (Viola) feels that her craving for him, instead of his master is a misplaced affection. Sir Andrew Aguecheck pines for Olivia and is eager to challenge Cesario who appears to steal the Lady’s heart to a fight, yet Olivia does not know that he exists. Malvolio is deceived by Maria to think that Olivia loves him. His efforts to impress that feeling on Olivia earned him incarceration in a dark room, having been perceived as a mad man.

However, while Olivia does not fall for the men that are ready to stake all they have for her love, she falls for Cesario at first sight, without the slightest idea that Cesario (Viola) is her fellow woman masquerading as a man. Olivia’s mistaken marriage with Sebastin is accepted at the end only because he is an exact copy of Viola. In the same vein, Viola’s affection for his master and his master’s deep feeling for her make the switching of role from servant to wife possible when her real identity is revealed at last. Notwithstanding these two marriages at the end of the play, love in the text is portrayed as a hurting experience. At some point, the Duke sees it as cruel while for Olivia it is a plague.

The Use of Disguise in the Play

Disguise is a major instrument used in the play to advance its plot. It is used to deepen the problematic of mistaken identity and to complicate the perception of love. More than any other form of disguise used in the text, it is Viola’s disguise as a man that pushes the action of the play forward. In fact, almost everything is teleguided by it. Olivia falls in love with Viola in complete ignorance of her identify. Sebastin’s intrusion into the scene exacerbates things, causing Olivia to wed him in the place of Cesario (Viola). The semblance of Viola and Sebastin causes the Duke to exclaim:

One face, one voice

One habit and two persons

A natural perspective

That is and is not (Act V Scene I)

It is Viola’s disguise that causes the quarrel between Antonio and Viola, and between Sebastin and Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek. Viola is blamed because of the fight between Sebastin and Sir Toby. Although there is a moment of recognition when the cloud of ignorance is cleared and true identities revealed, Viola’s disguise, Feste’s camouflage and Maria’s forgery appear to have ruffled many and caused untold chaos. The use of disguise makes the comedy a sophisticated one with multi-layers of implication.

However, through the use of disguise, Shakespeare shows us how we fall prey to self-deception by always assuming that we are who we are not. He uses the element to show us how foolish each and every one of us can be. The twists and turns engendered by disguise make “the play a sophisticated comedy with an uneasy look at the human condition” (Serban, 1999).

CONCLUSION

William Shakespeare is ranked as the best among all the post-classical playwrights. His plays are excellent models for good poetry, penetrating themes and charming characterisation. They provide unlimited source for critical enquires. This unit examines the man and his comic writing.

This article examines briefly the biography of William Shakespeare and the nature of his dramaturgy before concentrating on his comedy. Attempt is made to discuss the nature and some basic characteristics of Shakespearean comedy. Finally, Twelfth Night is analysed with emphasis on the texture and universe of the play, the theme of love tangle and the use of disguise in the text.

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