Study Guide to The Comedies by William Shakespeare

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by William Shakespeare, considered one of the greatest playwrights in history. Titles in this study guide include Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, All's Well that Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure. As a collection of humor filled tales of Elizabethian life, the comedies depict fun, mischief, irony, mistaken identities, and intriguing wordplay. Moreover, his work draws audiences to sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy, darkness, and the depths of human experience. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Shakespeare’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

The earliest documented fact about William Shakespeare is to be found in the town register for births, deaths, and marriages - the Parish Register of the church of Stratford-on-Avon - which lists the date of Shakespeare’s christening as April 26, 1564. This, of course, is not the date of his birth, but scholars have generally considered Shakespeare’s birthday to have been three days earlier, because it was customary to have children christened at the age of three days. In addition, there is a tradition that Shakespeare died on his birthday anniversary; the date of his death appears on his monument as April 23, 1616. The dramatist was the third child of a family which was well known in the neighborhood. His father, John Shakespeare, was a merchant and his mother came from a well-established land-owning family in Warwickshire, where Stratford is situated. For a time, the family prospered and John Shakespeare rose to a high position in the administration of the town. Unfortunately, his financial situation declined; consequently, in 1587, he was removed from his position on the city councill and he seems to have had financial troubles until his death in 1601.

In the meantime, William Shakespeare was growing up in Stratford, then a town of about two thousand inhabitants - more important economically then than now. Traveling dramatic companies apparently stopped there, and it is possible that Shakespeare saw some of them. It was an important market town and boasted a good grammar school which Shakespeare probably attended. No school records concerning him survive, but, like most Elizabethan schoolboys he must have learned Latin, and probably some Greek. By the time he left school, he would have had to be fairly proficient in Latin. He did not go up to a university, possibly because of the financial reverses of his father.

The next important document concerning Shakespeare is a special marriage license issued on November 27, 1582, for the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older than he. There seems to have been some reason for the haste with which the ceremony obviously took place because the first child of the couple was born in May 1583. Twins, named Hamnet and Judith, were born in 1585.

At this point, we enter the realm of undocumented conjecture. No documents at all are to be found for the period between 1585 and 1592; consequently, this period is called “the lost years.” Certainly Shakespeare had been in Stratford in 1584, and probably again in 1585, for the christening of the twins. John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian and gossip, said that “Shakespeare had been, in his younger years, a schoolmaster in the country.” But Aubrey is not a trustworthy source. Another theory sends Shakespeare to the wars against the Spanish in the Low Countries, while yet another sends him to London where his initial job was that of holding horses for theatregoers. Probably the most frequently heard legend about Shakespeare concerns his hurried departure from Stratford after he allegedly had stolen some deer from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. All these theories are no more than legend and should be treated with caution. In 1592, Shakespeare reappears in documents in a pamphlet written on his deathbed by the university wit, playwright, and journalist, Robert Greene. Greene attacked Shakespeare for his presumption in competing with his betters in playwriting. Undoubtedly, Shakespeare was by this time a threat to the university men who also were trying to make their living with their pens.

For the rest of his working life, Shakespeare wrote for, and acted with, a single dramatic company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which became known as the “King’s Men” after the accession of King James I. All of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays were written for this group which performed them in the public theatres, in private theatres, in private houses, and at court. Shakespeare provided them with one or two plays a year until 1612-13 and he was also a sharer in the profits of the company.

Exactly how much of his time Shakespeare spent in London and how much in Stratford is not known. He was probably in Stratford for the funeral of his son Hamnet in 1596, and possibly for that of his father in 1601. Certainly his financial affairs seem to have been well managed. He invested substantially in Stratford real estate; in 1597, he bought New Place, one of the largest and finest houses in the town. He probably returned to Stratford permanently about 1610, but his work was not finished as two more complete plays and parts of two others were written afterwards.

The actual circumstances of Shakespeare’s death are not known; however, his monument gives the date of his death as April 23, 1616. A seventeenth-century tradition is that Shakespeare died of a fever contracted of a rather too merry meeting with the dramatist Ben Jonson and the poet Michael Drayton. Shakespeare’s will, prepared some time before, left bequests to his two daughters, his friends and partners in the King’s Men, and, of course, his wife. The oft-discussed bequest to Anne of the “second-best bed” has been taken to mean that the poet’s marriage was unhappy, but such bequests were common, and, further, the bed was probably the one in which they themselves slept.

THE ANTI-STRATFORDIANS

Possibly because of the rather fragmentary evidence concerning the life of Shakespeare, an anti-Shakespeare, or anti-Stratfordian, school of thought has developed. In general, followers of this school protest that Shakespeare was too uneducated to have written the plays himself, and a subtle snobbery seems to dictate that any candidate put forward as the “real” Shakespeare must be of superior birth and education to the playwright. Some of the suggested authors include Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Walter Raleigh. The Baconian and the Oxford theories are two most popular, but most scholars prefer to accept Will Shakespeare, Gent., as the creator of the plays which bear his name.

THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime. The texts published were of two kinds: (1) plays sold to printers by the King’s Men, usually when it needed money because the theatres were closed due to the plague; (2) pirated plays, or stolen and unauthorized texts, which were often inaccurate, and sometimes issued by unscrupulous printers who wanted to cash in on the popularity of a play. Both kinds of texts were usually printed in modest-sized volumes and called “quartos,” a word designating the size of the pages. The first kind of authorized text is usually called a “good quarto” and the pirated text a “bad quarto.” Sometimes, a bad quarto was followed by a good quarto publication. Shakespeare’s complete works were published in a large folio volume in 1623 by two of Shakespeare’s friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Most of the comedies discussed in this book appeared in print for the first time in 1623.

THE PUBLIC THEATRE OF SHAKESPEARE’S DAY

Shakespeare’s theatre was quite different from our own. It was an octagonal, or round, structure with three tiers of roofed galleries around the major section. The central portion was an unroofed yard, the “pit,” in which spectators stood. These “standing room only” places cost the least (one penny - later, twopence), and the people who stood were often scornfully referred to as “groundlings”; they were believed by the more educated people to like nothing but clowning. This belief is not entirely supported by evidence. The roofed galleries, which contained seats, cost more the higher up the seat; by 1596, young gallants were sitting on the stage itself. Both men and women went to the theatre, but boys played all the women’s roles in the plays. The stage projected almost thirty feet into the yard and was narrower at the front than at the back. The back half of the stage was roofed with thatch; the other half was left open. There was no proscenium arch and no front curtain, but there were curtains at the back between two sets of swinging doors which were placed at an angle to the stage. The curtain at the stage level formed the “inner stage” or “study” in which furniture properties were sometimes used, such as the bed in Othello. Above the “study,” a projecting balcony was built with a curtain about four feet behind it forming another inner stage. The balcony, or “tarras,” was useful for action such as that in the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Open windows were set on the upper level over the doors, and they, too, could be used. Above the tarras, there was a smaller balcony with a railing and a curtain which was generally used as a musicians’ gallery or for the upper deck of a ship. A collection of three gabled structures, the “huts,” was on the very top of this structure creating a fourth level from which sound effects could be produced, and from which objects, such as thrones, could be lowered onto the stage. Above the huts a flagstaff held the flag of the theatre which was flown during performances. Behind the stage, the “tiring house” or dressing room for the actors was constructed, while underneath the stage was the “hell” which had machinery for raising and lowering the stage trap doors. In all, there were seven separate playing levels on the flexible Elizabethan stage.

Performances, announced with trumpet calls, in the afternoon started about two o’clock and generally lasted approximately two hours. Daylight was the only illumination in the public theatres, though candlelight was used for indoor performances at court and in the private theatres. The capacity of the theatre varied with the individual building, but it is probable that the Globe, Shakespeare’s theatre, held between two and three thousand people. The building, however, was rarely filled to capacity except for a new play.

There were many advantages in this kind of theatre, and, in some ways, the physical characteristics of the building and the stage helped to dictate the form of the plays. Since there was no scenery, the stage represented any place the playwright chose. As a result, the action moved quickly from place to place and from scene to scene so that alternation of plot and subplot was much simpler than it is today. Also, the action could take place on several different playing levels. Elizabethan plays were, therefore, swift moving and were enhanced with poetry and ever-changing action rather than being hampered by scenery. Since there was no attempt at literal staging, sight and sound effects were evocative rather than endeavors to imitate realism. Further, the playwright himself, with language alone, was able to establish the sets in the imagination of the audience through he could not employ physical sets.

SHAKESPEARE’S WORK

In general, Shakespeare’s work falls into four major periods, all of which are represented in this book. The first period, 1590-1594 includes history plays and the early farces, The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, as well as the early romantic comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost. The second period, 1595-1600, includes additional history plays, the great comedies, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, now definitely dated 1597. The third period, 1600-1608, is the period of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, and his three unusual “problem plays,” of which All’s Well That Ends Well is an example. Even in comedy, Shakespeare seems to be concerned with the darker aspects of the human spirit, and it is only because All’s Well and its companion piece, Measure for Measure, end happily that they are classified as “comedies.” There is a great deal of bitterness and near tragedy in both. The final period, 1609-1613, seems totally different in tone from the former works. This is the time when Shakespeare is writing his dramatic romances, represented here by The Winter’s Tale. The playwright is moving away from his earlier methods and is creating a new, symbolic, and reconciliatory kind of drama which is extremely subtle in its presentation of ideas. These late romances always contain elements of tragedy, but they conclude in reconciliation and, in their almost circular organization, they seem to represent the repetition and varied occurrences of life itself.

INTRODUCTION TO THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

The Comedy of Errors is one of the few plays of Shakespeare which deals almost entirely with middle-class characters. It is also one of Shakespeare’s earliest pieces, although we may not have it in its original form, and it is usually dated 1592-93. The play does not concern itself much with the study of character, except, in small measure, with that of Adriana, who does develop in the course of the play. On the whole, the play is a farce dependent upon action which becomes faster and more confusing until the tangle is unraveled in the last scene. If one grants the initial assumption that one pair of twins can be mistaken by everyone in the play, then it is a small concession to grant the second assumption, that these twins should have equally identical servants, and all the incidents follow from there with perfect, though absurd, logic. The comedy depends almost entirely on a superb sense of stagecraft and it is interesting to note the number of variations that Shakespeare manages to work on the theme of mistaken identity. Like most of Shakespeare’s comedies, Comedy of Errors begins in sorrow and ends in joy with a grand finale in which all the characters are paired off. At the same time, however, Shakespeare manages to introduce a deeper note into the farcical play because of the near tragedy of Aegeon.

THE SOURCES

The main plot of the twins who cannot be told apart comes from The Menaechmi by the Roman playwright Plautus. Shakespeare, however, has brought in a subplot and added to the confusion by giving the twins equally indistinguishable servants. He has also used another play, the Amphitruo by Plautus, as a source for the situation of a husband locked out of his own house while his wife entertains another man. The frame narrative of the Aegeon-Aemilia plot comes from a third possible source, Appolonius of Tyre. Shakespeare lessened the part of the Courtezan in his play and gave Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, a sister, Luciana, possibly to add further doubling and, also, to give a romantic interest to the character of Antipholus of Syracuse. The character of Adriana, the shrew, is also contrasted with that of Aemilia, the abbess, who delivers a speech on wifely behavior.

THE TEXT

The play was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 and is Shakespeare’s shortest play, having a mere 1,777 lines. The date of its composition is disputed; one critic believes that it was originally written about 1590 and later revised. The text itself is considered good, but the unevenness of poetic style lends some support to the revision theory, though J. Dover Wilson believes that the play in an abridgement of a much longer work. Possibly it was never meant for an entire evening’s entertainment, but was instead an introductory piece, meant to precede another musical or dramatic performance.

THE PLOT

Aegeon, a merchant from Syracuse, has been arrested in Ephesus and condemned to death because he cannot pay the fine that is levied on all residents of his town if they are found in Ephesus. The Duke asks how he happened to come to Ephesus, knowing as he must of the enmity between the two towns. Aegeon then tells the Duke that he has come seeking his son. Some twenty-three years before, Aegeon’s wife, Aemilia, gave birth in Epidamnum to identical twin sons. At the same time, a poor woman also gave birth to identical twin sons at the same inn, and Aegeon bought these twins to be servants to his own two sons. When his business in Epidamnum was completed, he and his wife set sail for Syracuse, but their ship was wrecked on the way home and they were separated. Aegeon saw Aemilia, with one of her own children and one of the poor boys, picked up by a different ship from a port other than the one to which he was taken. Unable to find the rest of the party, Aegeon reared the remaining twin and his servant, giving them the names of their respective brothers. But when they were eighteen years old, his son wished to search for his brother so he left home accompanied by his servant. That had been five years before. Aegeon has received no word, so he has set out to look for his son. The Duke is so touched that he gives the desolate Aegeon one extra day to raise the money for his fine.

In the meantime, Antipholus of Syracuse, with his servant Dromio, has arrived in Ephesus, and, in order to avoid the fate of travelers from Syracuse, has said that he is from Epidamnum. He sends Dromio of Syracuse away on an errand; then Dromio of Ephesus arrives and tells Antipholus of Syracuse to come home to dinner. Antipholus of Syracuse is angered and beats Dromio of Ephesus, thinking that he is chastising his own servant.

We are now introduced to two new characters, Adriana, the wif...