In truth, while it may be said that in Shakespearian tragedy character is fate, in Shakespearian comedy, among the contrasts and surprises which form so abundant a source of its vivacity, not the least effective contrast is that of character set over, as it were, against itself, not the least effective surprise is that of character entering upon new phases under the play of circumstance. The unity and logic of character may not in reality be impaired, but the unity is realized in and through diversity. In punning, a word is made to play a double part; it jostles its other self, and laughter ensues. What is so single and indivisible as personality? But if John is mistaken for Thomas, accident seems to triumph over law, and the incongruity arises of a doubled personal identity—the apparent and the real. Antipholus, of Syracuse, like the little woman of the nursery rhyme, whose sense of personality was dependent on the length of her petticoats, is almost persuaded that he is other than himself. If Viola disguises in doublet and hose, she secures by anticipation the victory of Sebastian over Olivia's heart, while in her own heart she endures a woman's hidden love for the Duke. One man in his brief time on Shakespeare's comic stage may play many parts. The ascetic scholars of Navarre are transformed into the most gallant of lovers and the most ingenious of sonneteers. Katherine the curst becomes more resolute in her wifely submission than she had been in her virgin sauvagerie. Signior Benedick, who challenged Cupid at the flight, in due time alters to Benedick, the married man; my dear Lady Disdain, in pity for him, and a little in pity for herself, has yielded upon great persuasion. If, as Montaigne teaches us, man is the most variable of animals, perhaps we learn as important a truth about human nature from Shakespeare's comedies as from his more profound study of the fatality of character and passion in the tragedies.
The essentials of Shakespearian comedy at its best are, after all, simple and obvious enough—a delightful story, conducted, in some romantic region, by gracious and gallant persons, thwarted or aided by the mirthful god, Circumstance, and arriving at a fortunate issue. Such would not serve as a description of the comedies of Ben Jonson. He is pleased to keep us during the greater part of five laborious acts in the company of knaves and gulls, and at the close, poetic justice is satisfied with the detection of folly and a general retribution descending on evil-doers. Shakespeare, in comedy, is no such remorseless justicer. Don John, the bastard, is reserved for punishment, but it shall be upon the morrow, and the punishment shall be such as the mirthful Benedick may devise. Parolles escapes lightly with the laughter of Lafeu, and mockery, qualified by a supper, will not afflict him beyond endurance. Lucio is condemned to marry the mother of his child, which is so dire an evil that all other forfeits are remitted. Sir John Falstaff will join the rest by Mistress Page's country fire in jesting at his own discomfiture. Even Shylock is not wholly overwhelmed; he shall have godfathers and a godmother at his baptism, and remain in possession of half his worldly goods. Sebastian may live and discover that he is morally superior to Caliban, the thief, and Stephano, the drunkard. Iachimo kneels and receives the free forgiveness of Posthumus.
But if Shakespeare, in comedy, is niggard of punishment, he is liberal in rewards. And since almost all the stories he chooses for his comic stage are stories of love and lovers, what grand reward can be reserved for the fifth act so fitting as the reward of love? In the seventeenth century masque amid all its mythological, fantastic, or humorous diversities, one point, or pivot, of the action remained fixed—the incidents must give occasion to a dance of the masquers. So in Shakespearian comedy we may, with almost equal certainty, reckon upon a marriage, or more marriages than one, in act, or in immediate prospect, before the curtain closes. Or, if not a marriage, for the lovers may be wedded lovers at the opening, then, after division, or separation of husband and wife, what we may call a remarriage, with misunderstandings cleared up and faults forgiven. When Shakespeare wrote his earlier plays he was himself young, and his gaze was fixed upon the future; exultant lovers begin their new life, and the song of joy is an epithalamium. When he wrote his latest plays, he was no longer young, and he thought of the blessedness of recovering the happy past, of knitting anew the strained or broken bonds of life, of connecting the former and the latter days in natural piety. Youth still must have its rapture; Florizel must win his royal shepherdess, queen of curds and cream; the nuptials of Ferdinand and Miranda, "these, our dear-beloved," must be duly solemnized at Naples; but Shakespeare's temper is no longer the temper of youth; he is of the company of Hermione and Prospero, and the music of the close is a grave and spiritual harmony.
Between the first scene and the last the path in comedy is beset with obstacles and dangers, past which love must find a way—"the course of true love never did run smooth." These may be either internal—some difficulty arising from character, or external—difference of blood or of rank, the choice of friends, slanderous tongues, rival passions, the spite of fortune. The resolution of the difficulty must be of a corresponding kind; temper, or rash determination, must yield to the predominance of love, or the external obstacles must be removed by well-directed effort, or by a happy turn of events. The young king of Navarre and his fellow-students are immured by their ascetic vow of culture; Isabella is all but ceremonially pledged to the life of religion; Olivia is secluded by her luxury of sentimental sorrow; Beatrice, born to be a lover, is at odds with love through her pride of independence and wilful mirth; Bertram has the young colt's pleasure in freedom, refuses to be ranged, and suffers from the haughty blindness of youth, which cannot recognize its own chief need and highest gain. All such rebels against love will be subdued in good time. On the other hand, it is her father who has decreed that Hermia shall be parted from Lysander; both father and mother have rival designs for marring the destiny of sweet Nan Page; a false friend and fickle lover separates Valentine and Silvia; a malignant plotter, who would avenge on all happy creatures the wrong of his own base birth, strikes down Hero with the blow of slander as she stands before the altar. But love has on its side gallantry and resource, loyalty and valour, the good powers of nature and the magic of the moonlit faery wood; and so, over the mountains and over the waves, love at last finds out a way.
Love being the central theme of Shakespearian comedy, laughter cannot be its principal end, and cruel or harsh laughter is almost necessarily excluded. But the laughter of joy rings out in the earlier and middle comedies, and a smile, beautiful in its wisdom and serenity, illuminates the comedies of his closing period. If satire is present, it is only on rare occasions a satire of manners; it deals rather with something universal, a satire of the fatuity of self-lovers, of the power which the human heart has of self-deception, or it is a genial mockery of the ineptitude of brainless self-importance, or the little languid lover's amorous endeavours, or the lumbering pace of heavy-witted ignorance, which cannot catch a common meaning, even by the tail; at its average rate of progress the idea whisks too swiftly from the view of such slow gazers.
The dramatis personæ form a large and varied population, ranging in social rank from the king to the tinker and the bellows-mender. Princes, dukes, courtiers, pages, dissolute gallants, soldiers, sailors, shepherds, clowns, city mechanicals, the country justice, the constable and head-borough, the schoolmaster, the parson, the faithful old servant, the lively waiting-maid, roysterers, humourists, light-fingered rogues, foreign fantasticoes, middle-class English husbands and wives, Welshman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian, Jew, noble and gracious ladies, country wenches, courtesans, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, the maiden, the wife, the widow—all sorts and conditions of human mortals occupy the scene, while on this side enters Caliban, bearing his burden of pine-logs, and Ariel flies overhead upon the bat's back, on the other, the offended king of faery frowns upon Titania, and claims his pretty Eastern minion.
The characters are ordinarily ranged, with an excellent effect on dramatic perspective, in three groups or divisions. The lovers and their immediate friends or rivals occupy the middle plane. Above them are persons of influence or authority by virtue of age or rank, on whom in some measure the fortunes of the lovers depend. Below them are the humbler aiders and abettors of their designs, or subordinate figures lightly attached to the central action, yet sometimes playing into the hands of benevolent Chance, and always ready to diversify the scene, to enliven the stage, to afford a breathing-space between passages of high-wrought emotion, to fill an interval with glittering word-play or unconscious humour, to save romance from shrill intensity or too aerial ascension by the contact of reality. Shakespeare in comedy was hardly quite happy until he had found his Duke and his clown; then he had the space in which he could move at ease; love remains his central theme, but it is love which rises out of life; his principal figures are rendered more distinct, are seen more in the round, because they stand out from a rich and various background.
Intrigue; and the Treatment of Materials.—The intrigue of Shakespeare's comedies is seldom of his own creation. He understood by "invention" something finer or rarer than the construction of a plot. The greatest workers in literature—we must perhaps except Dante—have been the trouvères, the finders. To form a being out of the clay, and to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life is an act of creation in the finest sense of the word. What is material and mechanical Shakespeare willingly accepts from others; his range of invention is almost without limit, but it is invention in the spiritual world. No sufficient sources have been found for his earliest comedy—Love's Labour's Lost—and for what was perhaps his latest—The Tempest; it does not follow, however, that in these instances he varied from his customary practice. When Shakespeare dealt with the substantial matter of history, he remained upon his native soil, until through Plutarch he discovered Rome. No dramatist of his age is more truly an English patriot; no other evocation of the past in poem or play is so truly alive or so truly national as that effected in Shakespeare's series of chronicle histories; and with his English history he has connected his robustest piece of comedy—no romance of love, but a comedy of character, essentially national in its humour, its exultant mirth, its pathos, the chronicle history of King Falstaff on his tavern throne. But breathing the air of the English Renaissance, he turned away in his romantic comedies from his own country to Italy, the land of romance. Once—in Cymbeline—he is a debtor to Holinshed, but Holinshed has here to summon Boccaccio to his aid. Even The Merry Wives of Windsor, as far as we can trace its sources, is indebted for some of its laughable adventures to the Italian novelle. Twice Shakespeare borrowed the plots of comedies from tales by contemporary writers of England,—As You Like It is founded upon Lodge's Rosalynde; The Winter's Tale, upon Greene's Pandosto. But although Lodge's story was in part derived from a poem of rough and humble incidents, characteristically English, it was transformed in his hands into a much-embroidered amorous pastoral of the Renaissance, and Greene's Pandosto is equally a product of exotic southern culture.
Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, elder English dramas derived from Italian sources, Spanish pastoral romance—these furnished the booty on which Shakespeare laid hands with the right of a conqueror. He selected, omitted, altered, added, moulding the mass of material with plastic hands, which are gentle because they are strong. Frequently he complicates the intrigue; sometimes he entangles a secondary plot with the primary; sometimes he emends the ethics, or purifies the atmosphere, or saves some cherished character from dishonour; in many instances he creates new personages, who are the interpreters of his own wisdom or humour or gracious temper. Thus in As You Like It, though the loves of Orlando and Rosalind are transposed from the languid artificial pastoral of Lodge into the spirited wood-notes of Shakespeare, we look in vain through Lodge's romance for the sentimental-cynical Jaques, dilettante collector of curious experiences, for Touchstone, the courtier-clown, with his logic of nice distinctions, for Audrey, no Dresden-china shepherdess, but fascinating to her ingenious suitor by virtue of her robust charms and her flattering inferiority of brain. Again, in Twelfth Night the character of Malvolio and of the whole group of his tormentors—Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, Feste, Maria—are added to his originals by Shakespeare. The languorous love-in-idleness of the Duke Orsino, and Olivia's sadness prepense demanded a contrast, and in Shakespeare's imagination sprang up this crew of toper and droll and slender-witted gentlemen, and mischief-loving maid, who seem to take hands and dance around the solemn figure of that deluded magnifico of domestics. To cite but one other example, how would Much Ado about Nothing dwindle if Beatrice and Benedick, its brain of wit and pulse of gallantry, were to disappear from the scene! But these, and with them the office-bearing majesty of Dogberry, prince of constables, and the astute intelligence of goodman Verges ("an old man, sir; but honest as the skin between his brows") are engrafted by Shakespeare on the original of Bandello.
Relation to Predecessors and Contemporaries.—From his predecessors and early contemporaries Shakespeare doubtless learnt whatever it was in their power to teach; at the same time he started forth on ways of his own. In Lyly he saw how something of the ideality of the masque could be transferred to comedy; how comedy could escape from the grosser world of the actual to a realm of courtly classical fantasy; how action could be suspended to give scope for the play of sparkling or ingenious dialogue in prose; how dainty song could come to the aid of speech which threatened to grow tedious; how disguises of sex could lead to delicate and diverting confusions. But Shakespeare must have perceived the lack of human interest in Lyly's plays; the deficiency of action, which often causes the progress of the piece to languish or to cease; the slight or colourless characterization; the mechanical artificiality, and monotonous balance of certain elements in Euphuistic prose. What was sprightly and ingenious in Lyly's dialogue he preserved; but of Euphuism in the strict sense we find nothing in Shakespeare's plays, except a passage of mockery, appropriately introduced where Falstaff in the tavern discourses as a moralizing father to that well-bred youth, Prince Hal,—"For though the camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears." Nor, unless it be the passage describing Oberon's vision of Cupid aiming his shaft at the fair vestal throned in the West, does he follow Lyly in mythological allegory, which conceals and betrays contemporary persons and events.