Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

I

When we consider the antics indulged in by actors of the custard-pie comedies which make many of us guffaw violently as they succeed one another on the screen and when we analyze the witticisms which make many of us smile appreciatively as they cascade down the dialog of Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ we disclose that our laughter, gentle as it may be or boisterous as it is more often, can be aroused by two distinct factors, by the shock of surprize and by the reaction of an awakened sense of superiority. Wit delights us by its exploding unexpectedness; and humor awakens pity for its victims and also pride that we are not as weak as they are, not as short-sighted or as muddle-headed, not as prone to make fools of ourselves.

As the simplest and easiest form of wit is a play on words and as the simplest and easiest form of humor is a practical joke, we need not be surprized that the comedies and farces of ’prentice playwrights are likely to crackle with an arbitrary collocation of vocables so put together as to create at least the semblance of wit and also that these firstlings of the comic muse are likely to contain episodes of arbitrarily built up practical joking. These two characteristics are infallible witnesses to the juvenility of the author of any play in which they are abundant. Marlowe died young; and this may account for the dreary emptiness of the would-be comic scenes in ‘Doctor Faustus’ with their perverse practical jokery. If we needed internal evidence to corroborate the external proof that ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ is one of Shakspere’s earliest comedies we could find it in his obviously painstaking effort to achieve verbal brilliance and in the palpably artificial play-within-the-play lugged into the final act so that one group of characters can laugh at another group, created solely to serve as butts for the merriment of their associates.

As Shakspere was an Elizabethan Englishman he outgrew his relish for puns very slowly; and he retained his willingness to rely on the practical joke as a basis for comic situations even as late as the middle of his career, when he wrote the last and tenderest of his romantic comedies, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It is only fair to admit that the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play upon Malvolio is not an empty mechanism; it is just what those two delightful companions would devise to get even with the cross-gartered Puritan and to punish him for his paraded self-sufficiency. So the trick which Prince Hal and Poins play upon Falstaff and which prompts him to the noble narrative of his combat with the men in buckram,—this also is completely in accordance with the character of the fat knight and of the future king; and moreover it serves most admirably to reveal Falstaff’s superb imperturbability and his infinite resourcefulness in extricating himself from a morass wherein a slow-witted man would have sunk helpless.

With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human. We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere, even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth, thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere.

George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly, first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen; and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the humor is sympathetically human.