Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

In the comedies of Robert Greene examples already existed of the romantic tale of love and lovers handled in dramatic fashion. Amid the vulgar surroundings of his sorry London life, Greene preserved a certain purity of idyllic imagination. His comely maidens and loyal wives, tried and true, had shown how important and how attractive a part may be borne by women upon the comic stage. He had exhibited with some skill the art of connecting two intrigues—the primary and the subordinate. He had placed comic matter side by side with matter which approximated to tragic. He could pass from verse to prose, and could mingle with blank verse, sometimes brocaded with ornament but often fresh and sweet, easy rhymed couplets and such other arrangements of rhyme as Shakespeare practised in his early plays. But he often erred through an attempt at Marlowesque magnificence and through the pride and pomp of pseudo-classical decoration. He lacked that humour of good sense, directed upon oneself, which warns a writer when he is in danger of falling into absurdity. His ludicrous scenes do not always assist the more serious or romantic matter of the play; they are too much of the nature of an interlude or divertissement. His feeling for what is laughable was somewhat primitive and crude; a vigorous bout at quarter-staves, a lusty drubbing, the extravagant pranks of a mediæval devil, were simple and unfailing receipts to shake the ribs of the groundlings. If Shakespeare was a pupil of Greene's in comedy, he was an intelligent pupil, who knew what to remember and what to forget.

Except as regards the form of his verse and prose it cannot be said that Shakespeare, as a writer of comedy, was ever in a true sense in discipleship to any master. He found suggestions, and used them, but he took his own way. The history of his development consists in great measure in the gradual coalescing of the various faculties from which poetry may be derived. In his latest comedies intellect and emotion are fused together; wit has been taken up into moral wisdom; imagination in its highest reach is united with the simple, primary feelings of our humanity; gaiety and seriousness interpenetrate each other; tenderness and pity are alive in the breast of the comic Muse; the laughter is often the laughter of human sympathy and of a pathetic joy; if we smile at the quaint forms of the hieroglyph of life, we know that it has a deep and sacred meaning. From the outset Shakespeare thought of comedy as a mirror of human life, which should reflect things sad and serious as well as mirthful, and which by its magic power should convert pain into pleasure; but the two elements of Shakespearian comedy exist side by side in the earliest plays; they are not yet fused into one. In the main, Shakespeare at first relied upon his nimble brain, and aimed at exciting laughter by comic surprises, contrasts, and incongruities which lie upon the surface of things and are the offspring of accident rather than of character. His delight in wit-combats and word-play is a transference to language of the same feeling which made him delight in the errors and disguisings of his persons. There is a laughter which arises from no profounder cause than titillation; the harlequinade of words, leaping one over the other, parrying, riposting, and suddenly disappearing under a mask of invisibility, yet still striking, as it were, out of the shadow, serves as a titillation of the brain.

Shakespeare's Development as a Comic Dramatist.—In his earliest group of comedies, Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, dating perhaps from about 1590 to about 1594, Shakespeare experimented in various directions. We might name the group that of his transformation plays. The comic surprise, the comic incongruity is that of man suddenly converted from his true to a false self or from a false self to a true. Human will is here the sport of nature or the sport of accident. Nothing is but what is not. The vowed students of Navarre are betrayed into the very opposite of their assumed selves by the power of nature and of love. Proteus, the servant of Julia, the comrade of Valentine, forsakes his mistress and his friend, and is as suddenly reconverted. The brothers Antipholus and the brothers Dromio are so shuffled together by the juggler Chance, that we question if any personal identity will survive and reëmerge at the close. Whether Lysander and Demetrius will awake the rival lovers of Helena or the rival lovers of Hermia, or whether Lysander will love Hermia and Demetrius Helena, depends on the merest luck of fairy-land. But nature and luck are on the side of love; all will be set right before the end. And because women lie closer to nature than men, and their affections hold the bent with the directness and certainty of nature, they are true and constant to themselves, neither deluding their hearts with pseudo-ideals, nor changed by the play of circumstances from what they are, but using their woman's wit and woman's will to attain their proper ends.

Love's Labour's Lost has the air of a young writer's effort to be original, and to dazzle by unflagging cleverness; whence at times a tedium of wit. Shakespeare seems to have resolved to owe his plot to no man, with the result that it is somewhat too much a prepared vehicle for the exposition of an idea. The little cloister of culture, where education is to be a fine art removed from nature, is invaded by woman, and with the entrance of woman enters nature, which has more of wisdom to impart than all the academies or schools. The denouement must be as original as the general design; death arrives in the midst of mirth; there shall be no weddings in the fifth act; love's labour is lost; or, if not lost, its reward is deferred a twelvemonth; the scholars turned lovers are still infected with something of unreality and affectation, exhaling their sentiment in Petrarchan ingenuities, and one of them, Biron, with his mocking humour, takes life too proudly and wilfully; the mad girls of France are at heart serious, and they will test their lovers by a year of genuine probation, then, and not till then, the marriage bells shall ring. The Spanish fantastico, Don Adriano, towering in stature, though not in wit, above his minion page, and the learned schoolmaster Holofernes, much admired of his companion pedant, the curate, resemble stock figures of Italian comedy. Affectations of language—the decorated dialect of fashion, the pedantries of scholarship not too profound—are also departures from nature, and must submit to the laughter of good sense. Nature may, indeed, be mended by art, for nature in its first rudiments, as seen in honest Costard and goodman Dull, is not wholly a thing of beauty and of joy, but the art which mends nature must be, as the wise Polixenes afterwards declared, an art that nature makes. Love's Labour's Lost—the Precieuses ridicules of Shakespeare, but with men for the presenters of preciosity and women as the exponents of good sense—is a comedy of dialogue rather than of incident. The stage is kept alive with much tossing about of brains in wit-encounters, with maskings and disguisings, and with that marred show of the Nine Worthies, a heroi-comic forerunner of the tedious, brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe, in which the hard-handed men of Athens appear before Duke Theseus.

The Comedy of Errors is a comedy of incident. Here Shakespeare accepts his plot, his chief characters, and their adventures from Plautus. But the adventures are complicated by his addition of the two Dromios, which more than doubles the possibilities of ludicrous confusion. The fun cannot be too fast or furious; the unexpected always happens; the discovery is staved off to the fifth act with infinite skill; the nearer each brother approaches his fellow, the more impossible it becomes for them to meet. Nowhere has Shakespeare ravelled and unravelled the threads of an intrigue with such incomparable dexterity as in this early play. But Shakespeare's imagination could not rest satisfied with a farce, however laughable or however skilfully conducted. His vein of lyrical poetry breaks forth in the love-episode, for the sake of which he created Luciana. And he has set the entire comic business in a romantic and pathetic framework—the story of the afflicted old Ægeon and the Ephesian abbess, in whom he discovers his lost wife. The play opens with grief and the doom of death impending over an innocent life; it closes, after a cry of true pathos, with reconciling joy, and the interval is filled with laughter that peals to a climax. This is not the manner of Plautus; but laughter with Shakespeare would seem hard and barren—the crackling of thorns under a pot,—if it were wholly isolated from grief and love and joy.

Shakespeare did not again attempt the comedy of mere incident. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona he struck into his favourite tune—the comedy of romance. Among its sources is the Spanish pastoral of Jorge de Montemayor, but the scene is Italy, the woman-country wooed in this play before it was wed by the imagination of its poet in The Merchant of Venice. The theme is love, its fidelity and its infidelity—love with its incalculable surprises, love with its unalterable constancy. The characters are lightly yet gracefully outlined; there are the grave and reverend seniors; the contrasted pairs of lovers; the waiting-woman; and the clownish men-servants, to whom the business of laughter is intrusted. The persons are somewhat mechanically set over, one against the other,—Valentine the loyal against the fickle Proteus, Silvia the sprightly against the tender Julia, Speed the professional wit against Launce the unconscious humourist, whose filial affections and amorous desires for the milkmaid, who has more qualities than a water-spaniel, are only secondary to his devotion to the cur Crab, a dog, indeed, to whose share some canine errors fall, but endowed with more qualities than a wilderness of milkmaids. The disguising of Julia in masculine attire anticipates many such disguisings in later comedies. It is no frolic masking like that of the girls of France, but part of the serious-playful romance of a woman's brave and gentle heart. The blank verse is sweet and regular rather than swift or powerful in dramatic movement; rhyme is less frequently used than heretofore; the prose of Launce's soliloquies has a homely directness and vigour.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream comedy becomes lyrical. Character is subordinate to incident, but incident here has a dreamlike quality, which unites itself with the poetry of a fantastic world. It is a comedy of errors,—the errors of a night,—but the confusions are not external and material as in the adventures of the brothers Antipholus; they are inward and psychological; the bewilderment is one of passions, not of persons. The triumph of the poet lies before all else in the power which he shows of harmonizing materials seemingly the most incongruous. The magnificence of Theseus and his Amazonian bride,—power in the full tide of prosperity,—the crossed and wayward loves of youths and maidens, the minikin-mighty strifes of fairy-land and its roguish sports, the artistic pains and illustrious ineptitude of the crew of hempen homespuns—all these are wrought together in a dream which we accept with a tranquil and delighted wonder.

The power of the human will is, as it were, suspended in this play of elfland magic. Before The Merchant of Venice was written, Shakespeare's feeling for dramatic action and passion had been deepened and invigorated by his progress in dealing with English history and probably by the creation of a great tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy of love and youth and death. The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare's first, and perhaps his most remarkable, example of the comedy of character. Here we pass from the realm of caprice to that of human volition. A passive object, the merchant, is placed in the midst as a prize to be contended for by forces naturally adverse—the passion of concentrated revenge and the spirit of charity, armed with the brightest weapons of intelligence. The masculine and the feminine powers enter upon a single combat, and victory remains with mercy and love, the "Ewigweibliche." No such figure as that of Shylock had previously appeared upon the English stage. In his person Shakespeare not only lays bare the nerve and muscle of a wrestler in the game of life, but studies the darker and sadder features of a race. He is no incredible monster like the Barabas of Marlowe, but a man, whose origins and environment have made him what he is; whom, therefore, we understand and whom in his very pitilessness we are constrained to pity. Nor had the English stage hitherto seen any woman so complex in her various powers of intellect, emotions, will, so single in their harmonious coöperance, as the noble lady of Belmont. The same energy of resolve which makes her the armed champion of Antonio had lain hidden in her loyalty to the arduous conditions of her father's will. The dramatist in this play postulates our acceptance of certain external improbabilities; these concessions made, all things are wrought out in accordance with the laws of life. The spirit of tragedy here is neighbour to the comic spirit, yet observes the finest decorum. Two actions—that of the caskets and that of the pound of flesh—work into each other without a jar and become one. The characters are grouped with perfect freedom and with an exact, though unobtruded, ordonnance, for Shakespeare's art had now learnt to conceal itself. The fifth act of the play is a kind of lovely epilogue, where, after the strained anxiety of the trial-scene, joy is preserved from its own excess by the instinct of self-mockery.

It may be that the humbler humorous scenes of the English historical plays on which he was now engaged drew down the imagination of Shakespeare as a writer of comedy from romance to realism, and made him content to work for a little while in rougher material. The Taming of the Shrew, whatever its chronological place may be, is only a spirited adaptation of an older play, and is chiefly interesting as an example of Shakespeare's art in transposing, developing, enriching with detail, the ideas of a predecessor, and as a demonstration of the temper with which he could kindle a predecessor's allegro into an allegro con brio. With old Sly's son of Burton heath, the village sot, he was upon his native soil, and he could heighten his original with low-life reminiscences of Warwickshire taverns. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a direct offshoot from the greater comedy of Falstaff which is incorporated in the historical plays. The tradition that it was hastily written by command of Queen Elizabeth, who desired to see "Falstaff in love," relieves us from the necessity of supposing that Shakespeare voluntarily degraded his indomitable jester into the flouting-stock of a bourgeois fabliau, "Well I am your theme: you have the start of me; I am dejected; ... ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me; use me as you will." That Shakespeare should throw himself with spirit into his task was a crime for which he earns our forgiveness by its successful issue. The merry wives are honest buxom dames, without a grain of real malice in them. The French physician and the Welsh parson murder the Queen's English with as happy a valiance as that of Fluellen and the Princess Katharine in King Henry V. Slender is the most delightfully incompetent of wooers—a Romeo manqué of Windsor, whose amorous passion waits upon his cousin Shallow's promptings and whose wit is mislaid with his Book of Riddles. The buck-basket and the old woman of Brentford are very palpable jokes, which the crassest gentleman-usher or emptiest-headed maid-in-waiting could not miss. There are the proper topical allusions to call forth an interchange of smiling mutual intelligence. Altogether The Merry Wives was a comedy delicate enough for a queen. For such a play the proper medium was prose; verse is reserved for the slender love-episode of Fenton and Anne Page, and for the scenes connected with the fairy disguising.

As the pressure of the English historical plays lightened, Shakespeare could turn again to Italy and to romance. In The Merry Wives he had grouped his characters in a circle around a gross old self-lover, whom it was their business to delude and mock. Perhaps the same device could be refined upon and turned to romantic uses. Falstaff had professed love and had been convicted of sordid self-interest. What it a pair of high-spirited persons, touched with the egotism of self-sufficingness and wilful wit, and professing a superiority to the toys of lovers, could be ensnared into that deep mutual passion which was in truth written for them in the book of fate? But there must be something deeper here than a jest; such brave union of hearts must be cemented by a common effort to confront the sorrow of the world. At this time, perhaps, Shakespeare was concerned with his revision of Love's Labour's Lost. Might not Biron and Rosaline be reincarnated, and in place of that crude test of a twelve months' visitation of the speechless sick decreed for Biron, might not an immediate test of valiant manhood be discovered, and the newer Biron come to the happy ending of love's labour's won? In Beatrice and Benedick a brilliant centre was found for the play of Much Ado about Nothing. The high spirits, which gave life to The Shrew and The Merry Wives are here refined by gallantry and beauty, wit and grace, and by the presence of injury and pain. The other dramatis personæ gather around the hero and heroine to beguile them into love; the passion begotten of a jest is brought forth in sorrow, and sorrow at the close is converted into joy. With so much of quick and lambent dialogue as Beatrice and Benedick have to utter, we want no outstanding jester here; his speech would be an impertinence; but we need a counterfoil to wit in the unconscious humour of a Dogberry and a Verges; and these worthies assist effectively in the action of the play; Fate, the sphinx, assumes an ironic smile; the dulness of a blundering watchman unties a knot which has foiled the dexterity of the wise.