IV
What I have called the norm of love must thus rank high among the determining forces of his mature drama. Obscured and disguised at the outset by crude conceptions and immature technique, it gradually grew clear, and provided the background of passion, faith, and truth out of which, aided by misunderstandings, pleasant or grave, his most delightful comedy and his most poignant tragedy were evolved. And other types of love—whether they made for comedy or for tragedy, held a relatively slight place in his work. In particular he concerns himself only in a quite exceptional or incidental way either with the high comedy of love or with guilty passion.
His comedy of love outside the norm for the most part resembles burlesque. In other words, the ‘ways of love’ which he treats as comic material are not plausible or subtle approximations to romantic passion, but ludicrously absurd counterfeits of it. The fun is brilliant, but it does not strike deep; it provokes the loud laugh rather than the ‘slim feasting smile.’ It commonly springs from some grotesque infatuation; as when, in Bottom and Titania, human grossness and fairy fantasticality are brought together for the eternal joy of gods and men. Ridicule of such infatuations was soon to find its peculiar home in the Humour comedy of the later nineties, in the prosaic satirical air of which the romantic or normal love had no place at all. It is hardly an accident that the plays in which this Shakesperean comedy of grotesque infatuation in love runs riot were produced when the Humour comedy was at the height of its vogue, or that they bear clear traces of its influence. Twelfth Night is far from being as a whole a Comedy of Humours. Viola’s maiden passion is touched with a charm wholly alien to it. The Duke, with his opal and taffeta mind, a self-pleasing artist in emotion, who feeds his languid passion on music, and does his wooing by proxy, is perhaps Shakespeare’s only serious study of love as a humour. Of still more laughable futility is the love-making of Malvolio, with his smiles and yellow stockings, and Sir Andrew, who gets no further than learning an assortment of fine words for an interview that never comes off—a comic counterpart to Iago’s miserable dupe, Roderigo. The Merry Wives also shows the influence of the Humour comedy. Slender is a true ‘country-gull,’ nowhere more obviously than in his wooing, or preparations to woo, sweet Anne Page. The adventures of Falstaff in pursuit of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page are brilliantly executed examples of a kind of comic effect which Shakespeare’s riper art elsewhere disdained. Officially required to represent ‘Falstaff in love,’ he turned the laugh against the lover by representing his ill-luck in pursuing the only ‘way of love’ he knew.