Farce Transformed: Plautus, Shakespeare, and Unamuno

Abstract

Farce is a generator of materials that can be utilized and even transformed by other modes-by comedy, of course, but even by romantic and tragic styles. In the next-to-last of his dozen dramas-El Otro (The Other), 1932 -Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) accomplishes a remarkable metamorphosis of certain raw materials of farce. He brings them into the realms of fundamental human melodrama and of tragedy. Here, as in other plays, he explores the themes of his best known work, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913). A still more significant point for dramatic criticism: if one read The Other without knowing who wrote it, one might suppose it to be by Pirandello. A characteristic Pirandellian procedure is the translation of a basically farcical situation into an epistemological problem. These diverse points can be boldly juxtaposed because the working out of their relationships canvasses each issue better than would an independent treatment of it. To say that farce is neither the fetus nor the corpse of comedy is to say that farce is neither a temporary primitive stage which necessarily grows into full comedy, nor the residue when comedy goes into a decline. Nevertheless cultural history, rather than some organic rise and fall, may make farce seem like the earliest, or the dilapidated latest, stage of comic form. We can see a development in time from early Greek phallic rites-fertility farce, as it were-to the sophisticated comedy of Aristophanes; from the farce of the miracle plays and sixteenth-century