The Essentials of Shakespearian Comedy.—The Comedies of Shakespeare, which form more than a third part of his dramatic work, belong to every period of his career as a writer, except one. During a few years, soon after the opening of the seventeenth century, he turned away from comedy, or rather he was drawn by some irresistible attraction to explore the tragic depths of life, and for a time its bright or variegated surface was lost to view. The results of his passionate inquisition of evil entered into the spirit of his latest plays, which we might name "romances" rather than "comedies," and hence the study of Shakespeare's lighter and brighter work cannot be wholly dissociated from the study of that in which terror and pity are the presiding powers.
To conceive Shakespearian comedy aright we must disconnect the word "comedy" from the associations derived from its adjectives "comic" and "comical"; we must recognize the fact that, though laughter is one of its incidents, laughter is not its end. Our chief living master of the carte and tierce of wit, Mr. George Meredith, describes folly as the natural prey of the comic spirit, "known to it in all her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest." Shakespeare's comedy includes the intellectual delight of chasing down folly and being in at the death, but this is not its main purpose. Nor is he eager to assume the part of the indignant moral satirist. It is not he but Ben Jonson, in the person of Asper, who announces that "with an armèd and resolvèd hand" he will
"Strip the ragged follies of their time
Naked as at their birth . . .
. . . and with a whip of steel
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs."
Shakespeare on occasions can wield the whip of steel, but it is when for a time he parts company with the spirit of comedy. Moral truth radiates through all the world of his creation, but he does not suppose that morality is served by being outrageously moral; in writing comedy he has more faith in sunshine as a sanative agent than in lightning and tempest. If he is ever contemptuous, it is because the pitifulness of such a baffled pretender as Parolles, or of such lean-witted conspirators as Antonio and Sebastian, admits of no other feeling. From personal satire he, unlike several of his contemporaries, wholly abstained, unless, indeed, the theory holds good, which finds in Troilus and Cressida that purge given by the player Shakespeare—so Kempe tells Burbage in The Return from Parnassus—to the pestilent fellow, Ben Jonson.
Perhaps it is impossible to include under any single general conception works which differ from each other as widely as The Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest; but if we cannot seize it as a whole, we may see from a little distance this side and that of comedy as understood by Shakespeare. Its vital centre is not an idea, an abstraction, a doctrine, a moral thesis, but something concrete—persons involved in an action. When philosophical critics assure us that the theme of The Merchant of Venice is expressed by the words Summum jus, summa injuria, or that it exhibits "man in relation to money," we admire the motto they discovered in their nut, and prefer the kernel in our own. The persons and the action are placed in some region, which is neither wholly one of fantasy nor yet one encumbered with the dross of actuality. Aery spirits, an earth-born Caliban, Robingoodfellow, the king and queen of Faery, may make their incursion into it, yet it is in the truest sense the haunt and home of "human mortals." The finer spirit of the poet's own age is forever present, but he makes no laborious effort to imitate life in the lower sense of reproducing contemporary manners. He turns away from his own country. Once—by command—Sir John Falstaff makes love to the laughing bourgeois wives of Windsor; but to comply with the necessity Shakespeare's comedy descends from verse to prose. Ben Jonson's invention is at home in Cob's Court and Picthatch, in the aisle of Paul's, or among the booths of Bartholomew Fair; having disguised the characters of his first important play under Italian names, he rightly christened them anew as Londoners. Shakespeare's imagination, throwing off the burden of the actual, desported itself in the Athenian moonlit wood and on the yellow sands of the enchanted island, under green boughs in Arden, in the garden at Belmont, in the palace of Illyria, at the shepherd's festival in Bohemia.
The action corresponds with the environment. In the great tragedies Shakespeare may on rare occasions demand certain postulates at the outset. These having been granted, the plot evolves itself within the bounds of the credible. In King Lear the opening scene puts some strain upon our imaginative belief, but Shakespeare received the legend as it had been handed down to him, and all that follows the opening scene—though the action is vast and monstrous—obeys an order and logic which compel our acquiescence. It is not always so, if we refuse its claims to fancy, in Shakespearian comedy. In a region which borders on the realm of fantasy we must be prepared to accept many happy surprises. Our desire for happiness inclines our hearts to a pleasant credulity; if chance at the right moment intervenes, it comes as our own embodied hope. When all and every one in Arden wood, save Jaques, are on their way to wedlock, like couples coming to the ark, we are not disposed to question the reality of that old religious man upon the borders of the forest who suddenly converts the usurping Duke, and turns back the mighty power which he had set on foot. We are grateful for such hermits and such convertites.
The characters again correspond in comedy with the environment and with the action. In tragedy character is either from the first fully formed and four-square, or, if it is developed by events, it develops in accordance with an internal law. Passion runs its inevitable course, like a great wave driven of the wind, and breaks with thunder upon the shoal of death. The human actors disappear; only the general order of the world and the eternal moral law endure. But in comedy the individual must be preserved, and must at the close enter into possession of happy days; if he has erred through folly or vice, his error has not been mortal; he may in the last scene of the fifth act swiftly change his moral disposition as he would change his outward garb. The traitor Proteus is suddenly restored to his better mind, and Valentine is generous enough to resign to the repentant traitor all his rights in Silvia. Bertram, who almost to the last entangles himself in a network of dastardly lies, is rescued from his dishonesty and foolish pride by a successful trick, and becomes the loyal husband of Helena. The Duke Orsino transfers his amorous homage from his "fancy's queen" Olivia to his "fancy's queen" Viola with a most convenient facility. Angelo discovers his own baseness in the moment when he perceives it is discovered by the world, and is straightway virtuous enough to bring the happiness required by a fifth act to the wronged Mariana. Even Iachimo—the Iago of a comedy—makes sorrowful confession of his villany, and restores the purloined bracelet and the ill-won ring. Such transformations as these indicate that even as regards character the law of comedy is a law of liberty. When it suits Shakespeare's purpose, the study of character can be profound and veracious; when occasion requires it, incident becomes all-important, and character yields to the requirements of the situation.