Shakespeare's Confluence of Tragedy and Comedy: Twelfth Night and King Lear

Abstract

WELFTH Night and King Lear, evidently written within four or five years of each other, are often considered Shakespeare's greatest single achievements in the two genres of comedy and tragedy, and at very least they may be said to represent his maturest dramatic practice. Here I wish to argue that these two plays draw in large part upon a common body of intellectual and thematic material, which Shakespeare's mind shapes in each case to the forms and effects appropriate to comedy and tragedy. By examining his diverse use of this common material, we may hope to know better both the terrific centrifugal power of Shakespeare's imagination, and the process by which comedy and tragedy crystallize their distinctive structures out of a single substance. An Elizabethan play is a life unto itself, of course, and any pursuit of differences between comedy and tragedy can easily become artificial and pedantic. Many of Shakespeare's solemn dramas have an admixture of comic stuff, and some of his ostensible comedies affright our risibility by their oblique seriousness. We find in the tragedies not only various shades and quantities of comic relief, but a comic posture in great men at their moments of intensest spiritual pain: Hamlet landing upright in Ophelia's grave with the announcement: This is I,/Hamlet the Dane; Othello eavesdropping on Iago and Cassio; or Lear bedecked with weeds speaking reason in madness. Comedies like The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, on the other hand, are barely laughable and offer at best only cold comfort. And the humiliations of Shylock, Falstaff, and Malvolio are well-known instances where a comic perspective is threatened by a distorting pathos. Tragedy and comedy also share many plot devices and situations. Both rely heavily upon intrigue; and the function of that old intriguer of the Moralities, the Vice, Shakespeare assigns indiscriminately to such as Puck and Iago. The customary apparatus of intrigue-the dropped handkerchiefs and forged letters and disguised madness, the indispensable arras and play-within-a-play, the slippings in and out of clothes to disguise sex and social status-all this provides