A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies

Michael Mangan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582095908
• eBook ISBN: 9781317895039
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context.

Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Part One

Contexts of Comedy

1 Laughter and Elizabethan society

Cultural distance and the study of comedy

Twelfth Night. Feste, the clown, licensed fool, enters to his drinking-companions, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The latter, delighted to see him, greets him with the following reminiscence.

Sir Andrew… In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spok’st of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus: ’twas very good, i’ faith: I sent thee sixpence for thy leman: had’st it?

Clown I did impeticos thy gratillity: for Malvolio’s nose is no whipstock, my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses.

(II, iii, 11. 22–9)

For years, actors and editors alike have been struggling valiantly to find in this kind of Shakespearean comic line some vestige of meaning which might be communicable to audiences and readers. In 1778, already nearly two centuries distant from Shakespeare’s wordplays, Samuel Johnson conjectured that some sense might be made of the phrase ‘impeticos thy gratillity’ were it to read ‘impeticoat thy gratillity’ – meaning to put a gratuity into the pocket of a petticoat – and he changed the Folio text accordingly. Clutching gratefully at this straw, the Arden editors J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik suggest the following gloss of Feste’s lines:

This speech begins as a kind of sense, and then sinks, or rises, into ‘the best fooling’. The Clown acknowledges Sir Andrew’s present (‘gratillity’ = gratuity; ‘impeticos’ = pocket in my long coat, the usual wear of fools, cf. Hotson, Shakespeare’s Motley, frontispiece); then, with a pseudo-logical ‘for’ (which should have discouraged further explication), he utters a trio of related remarks. ‘My lady’ is obviously Olivia rather than his ‘leman’, since it follows upon mention of Malvolio’s nose; the Myrmidons are the followers of Achilles, cf. Troil., V. iii. 33. There is no evidence whatever for a London tavern called the Myrmidons (nor, if there had been such a tavern, would it be referred to with a plural verb and noun). The explanations offered by Steevens and Hutson (given by Furness) have been extended by Wilson, Ribner and Charney; other explanations, relating to contemporary persons (Knollys, Queen Elizabeth, the Yeoman of the Guard), are proposed by Hotson (p. 50). All one can usefully say is that the reference to Malvolio is derogatory, the reference to Olivia is complimentary, and the reference to the Myrmidons is pure nonsense.¹

These are some of the things we can do, then, with such lines: we can seek to amend them and change them for words which make more sense to us. We can analyse their structure and show that a pseudo-logical connective is followed by a trio of related remarks. We can search the writings of previous generations of readers and scholars. We can attempt an archaeological dig for some forgotten contemporary reference such as a London tavern called ‘The Myrmidons’ or an allusion to the Yeomen of the Guard. And in the end perhaps we can say something noncomittal about tone: ‘derogatory… complimentary… pure nonsense’.

One thing we cannot do with them (or not easily) is laugh at them. Laughter involves understanding; it implies collusion. Who today can collude in this laughter? Sir Andrew Aguecheek, it seems, finds heartily funny a series of gags which Feste told the previous night concerning Pigrogromitus and the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. Is this, too, ‘pure nonsense’ or is there some lost reference here which makes Sir Andrew’s amusement pertinent? Or are we being asked to laugh at a knight so easily amused that he will laugh at pure nonsense? Is the gag, in fact, that there is no gag, that Feste’s babblings are pure sound, signifiers without signifieds? Or are we missing some joke so obvious – in Elizabethan terms at least – that even the dim-witted Sir Andrew can get it?

There are few things in Shakespeare’s plays which make it so clear that he is not our contemporary as these verbal witticisms. They stand like signposts written in an alien alphabet, simultaneously promising and denying enlightenment. The very act of attempting to understand them reinforces the truth that laughter is culturally specific. The raising of a laugh in the theatre – or even a decent smile – depends on mobilizing a set of shared points of reference. Shakespeare’s own audience, confronted with Pigrogromitus and the Myrmidons would (presumably) know either that this is all pure nonsense and that Sir Andrew is being sent up or that some comprehensible remark is being made about some current phenomenon. Not all of them would know this, perhaps, for audiences are strange creations, being both wave and particle, individual intelligences and the collective mind. Even so, enough of them would know enough about what is happening in those lines to provide the critical mass which creates the laughter. The quality of the laughter varies according to which interpretation is appropriate.

We are cut off from sharing in this response; our awareness that we do not know makes any laughter we are capable of different in kind from that which Shakespeare’s text first generated. We may sometimes manage to decode these verbal conundrums, to translate them or interpret them – but that is not the same as being able to ‘get’ them. To get the joke is to affirm oneself as a member of a community, and we are separated from that interpretative community by four hundred years.

Not that we never laugh: a good comic actor can make the most meaningless of lines funny and a twentieth-century audience can be entertained by seventeenth-century gags whose very impenetrability is a source of amusement. But this is a different joke. We laugh sometimes with relief: with self-congratulation that we have ‘understood’ the joke, that we are not excluded from the circle of the knowing. Or else the joke is at our own expense, and we laugh self-mockingly at ourselves, at our folly in sitting in our theatre, paying for our tickets, in order to be entertained by lines which neither we nor the actor on the stage can ever fully understand.

In later chapters I will be looking at the connections which exist between theatrical comedy and laughter. The links between the two may seem self-evident at first – yet if, as I suggest above, we lack any immediate access to much of the laughter of the plays, it is hardly surprising that most academic theories about Shakespearean comedy emphasize that laughter is not the point. Is this a typical classroom exchange?

Student Why is this called comedy? (Defiantly) I don’t think it’s very funny.

Teacher Ah, but in the literary sense, comedy is not about laughter. It is not like stand-up comedy or situation comedy. It is about a certain pattern of action, about the movement from chaos to order, from discord to concord; it is about the integration of the individual and society, the resolution of conflict, the restoration of the moral order. It is the mythos of spring – the celebration of life.

Student Oh. Right.

Much of what this fictional teacher says is true. Some of it will be repeated and expanded in later chapters. We will see that some Elizabethan literary theorists and playwrights make the same point, and that some more modern critics have taken the idea to an extreme. For example, L. C. Knights – an eminent ocommentator on Renaissance comedies – asserted that ‘once an invariable connection between comedy and laughter is assumed, we are not likely to make any observation that will be useful as criticism’.²

Yet this book starts from the premise that laughter is relevant to a study of comedy; and while we may recognize the cultural distance which separates our laughter from the laughter of Shakespeare’s first audiences, we need not be completely discouraged by it. Certainly there are plenty of Shakespearean jokes that we don’t get, but there are also many that we do. Shakespeare’s comedies still make theatre audiences laugh: it seems a perverse kind of academicism to declare that this laughter somehow does not matter. Among the contentions of this book will be (1) that Shakespeare’s comedies utilize various strategies of laughter for various ends; (2) that this involves different ‘kinds’ of laughter; (3) that these kinds of theatrical laughter have their analogies in the wider social functions of laughter in Elizabethan England.

It may seem strange to talk about the social functions of laughter. Laughter, after all, is something which we tend to take for granted. It is easy to assume that it is simply a natural attribute of being human – indeed it is often said that laughter is one of the distinguishing marks of being human. It is one of the (comparatively few) things that we do that other mammals do not. If laughter has a social function, it may be thought, it is this: to mark us off from the rest of the animal kingdom. But this is not taking the question far enough. Many of what we take to be ‘simply natural human attributes’ are actually dependent in various ways upon cultural conditioning. From family structures to gender identity, those things which everyday consensus belief sees as natural are actually socially constructed; they are in part at least determined by a range of social pressures, which shape them even if they do not always cause them.

And so it is with laughter. We laugh ‘naturally’ in part because we have learned from our culture that it is ‘natural’ to laugh; we have also learned what it is natural to laugh at. Laughter is not a constant, timeless, unchanging phenomenon but the product of specific human relationships. A detailed history of laughter (which this is not intended to be) would have to start with the fact that different ages have placed different values on laughter: not only do different periods find different things funny, but the very act of laughing – this ‘natural’ activity – is accorded different values in different historical periods. Polite society in the eighteenth century, for example, tended to disapprove of audible laughter altogether. It showed, they believed, a lack of dignity and of bodily control which was unbecoming in a lady or gentleman. Whereas the twentieth-century cliché holds that laughter delineates humans from animals, the eighteenth-century commonplace was just the opposite – that laughter debased men and women, making them more and more like animals. ‘There is nothing so illiberal and so illbred as audible laughter,’ Lord Chesterfield advised his son in 1748, ‘… not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions.’³ In different historical periods, then, laughter may be accorded different kinds of status, and may serve different purposes. In this chapter we shall examine some of the purposes it fulfilled in the culture which also produced the comedies of Shakespeare.

While the status and function of laughter differs from one age and culture to another, a repeated function which it can be found to serve is that of providing a way of coping with issues which individuals and societies find threatening, embarrassing, or disturbing. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of nervous laughter: that laughter which occurs at seemingly inappropriate times, at moments of anxiety or self-consciousness. It may well be that this ‘nervous laughter’ is not an odd and unusual aberration from ‘normal laughter’, but an essential dimension of laughter itself. Thus, in very much the same way that an individual may laugh when nervous or embarrassed, so a whole society or social grouping may develop a culture of laughter around those issues which embarrass or threaten it. To put it at its most obvious, this means that racist jokes become popular at times and in places where racial issues are a source of anxiety or embarrassment; sexist jokes are told amongst social groupings for whom sexual identity is a source of anxiety or embarrassment, and so on. We laugh most loudly at those things which most concern or disturb us. At the same time, and in reaction to this, certain codes spring up amongst sub-groups within a society concerning what is or is not a permissible subject for laughter. This is easy enough to see in our own society. We may or may not think it acceptable to laugh at jokes about race, colour, gender, disability, religion etc. In making decisions about this, one way or the other, we also make decisions about our own relationship to and alignment with different cultural groups and belief-systems.

Thus in exploring the social function of laughter we will also find ourselves examining the anxieties and points of tension within a society. The character of a social grouping may be in part defined by the things it laughs at, and if we knew more about the laughter to be found in Elizabethan society we would know significantly more about that society as a whole. Yet the way in which this happens need not be as clear-cut as this makes it seem. On the one hand, not every joke about racial issues is a racist joke, nor every joke about sexuality sexist. Humour need not reinforce existing prejudices: it can also allow us to re-examine them. The line between these two functions is not always easy to discern; often it depends less upon the joke itself than upon the context and the spirit in which it is told and heard. And on the other hand, whatever our consciously-held beliefs about what is or is not a suitable subject for laughter, our internal moral censors may always be bypassed, with the result that we find ourselves laughing at jokes of which another part of our minds disapproves. Jokes, as Freud discovered, do not operate only on a conscious level; and the skill of a good comedian involves the crafting of humour so that it makes contact, too, with the listene...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Prefatory note and acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Prologue: Shakespeare's England – an overview
• Part One Contexts of Comedy
• Part Two Critical Analysis
• Part Three Reference Section
• Further reading
• Appendix: The theatres of Shakespeare's London
• Index