COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE AND ITS IMPACT ON SHAKESPEARE’S PASTORAL COMEDY AS YOU LIKE IT

Abstract

The paper explores the origins, development and basic genre features of сommedia dell'arte. The first part of the paper deals with the archetypal comic elements of сommedia dell'arte. The historical significance of this type of comedy, as Pandolfi (1957) stresses, lies in the fact that it unequivocally confirms the autonomy of theatrical art by imposing the neverending quest for the freedom to critically examine all the aspects of social life without any dose of censorship or limitations. Its comic pattern has the roots in the grotesque and absurdity of real life, which allows for the actors to fully affirm their artistic aspirations. Shakespeare’s romantic and pastoral comedy focuses on the final reconciliation or conversion of the blocking characters rather than their punishment: the rival brothers Oliver and Orlando are reconciled; Duke Frederick is miraculously converted. This was also a theme present in the medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual play, as Frye notices and claims that “we may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world” (Frye 1957, 182). The Forest of Arden in As You Like It represents an emanation of Frye’s “green world”, which is analogous to the dream world, the world of our desires. In this symbolical victory of summer over winter, we have an illustration of “the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ’reality’, but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate” (Frye 1957, 184). In addition, the marriage between Orlando and Rosalind takes place in the Forest of Arden not by a coincidence. This is Shakespeare’s vision of the final unity and healing only to be accomplished in the ‘Mother’ Forest, as Hughes terms it (1992, 110), which ultimately represents a symbol of totality of nature and men’s psychic completeness. In Frye’s reading of Shakespeare’s green world, an identical idea of the heroine as the lost soul is expressed: “In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disappearance and withdrawal of human figures in romantic comedy generally involves the heroine” (Frye 1957, 183). Thus, Rosalind represents the epitome of the matriarchal earth goddess that revives the hero and at the same time brings about the comic resolution by disguising herself as a boy (for those members of the audience and/or readers who regard the play as an instance of Hughes’ passive ritual drama and thus primarily enjoy the process of the young lovers’ overcoming various impediments on the way to a desirable end of the play).