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Comedies...

 

Comedy is often the most evasive level of significance in drama.

Unlike tragedy, which tends to be universal and general, comedy is often situationally coded.

In other words, it is written for a specific audience which shares a set of common understandings. Comedy becomes possible only because of these shared understandings; it is intrinsically "topical," depending for its comic effect on particular situations.

Accordingly it may be difficult to translate comedy from one performance context to another. Everyone knows the standard for the joke which misfires: "you had to be there." If you weren't "there" -- in the context in which the joke was originally funny -- you won't "get" it.

Unfortunately the understanding of Shakespearean comedy in modern performance is often limited to slapstick. This is what translates most easily. But, of course, there is much more to Shakespearean wit than meets the eye at first glance.

Oxfordians see the comic dimension of the plays as vital in understanding the motives which led to the need for concealment of the author's real identity. The earl of Oxford was famous -- and sometimes infamous -- for his dangerous wit. Tom Nashe, warning Gabriel Harvey not to offend Oxford, writes of him: "He is a little fellow but he hath one of the best wits in England."

Nashe goes on to predict that if Harvey risks offending Oxford he will pay for it by being lampooned: "I prophesy that there would more gentle Readers die of a merrie mortality, ingendred by the eternal jests he would maule thee with, than there have done of this last infection" (Mckerrow I: 300-01)

Such a wit is dangerous, more so if the man who wields it moves in the highest circles of the power elite and is not afraid to lampoon them on the public stage.

This is a large subject, on which the Shakespeare Fellowship will expand considerably in coming weeks on this site.

For now, we are proud to open our section on comedies with two contrasting approaches to topical comedy in Shakespeare:

1) Robert Brazil's essay on Merry Wives of Windsor.

As Brazil cleverly notes, the very presence of Slender's "book of riddles" alerts the astute reader to the presence of a relentless undercurrent of comic wit in the play. Many of the jokes, he argues, are intimately related to the identity of the author, his antagonism towards the Earl of Leicester (Shallow) and his nephew Slender (Sir Phillip Sidney), and his comic compensation for not being honored as a knight of the garter.

2) Richard Desper's analysis of Twelfth Night.

Desper concentrates on the enigmatic language of Feste, one of the most abstruse characters in the entire Shakespearean canon, and shows that his jesting relates to matters of utmost seriousness, referring to the infamous trials and tribulations of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, who was eventually executed for his faith.

Read and enjoy.

References

McKerrow, Ronald B. The Works of Thomas Nashe, edited from the Original
Texts in Five Volumes. (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1910).