The Farce Pattern of Wycherley’s Love in a Wood

Abstract

THE FA R C E P A TT ER N OF W Y C H E R L E Y 'S LOVE IN A WOOD DEREK COHEN York University I W h i l e few would quarrel with Leo Hughes's assertion that the key to a definition of farce must be its emphasis on exciting laughter, one is still hard put to make clear distinctions between farce and other kinds of comedy.1 If, as Hughes maintains, the nature of the laughter elicited by farce and other kinds of comedy is a significant factor in making the distinction, the matter becomes only further complicated. Does it follow that, as no audience can guffaw continuously for the duration of a play, the quieter smiling between guffaws defines the play as a comedy? If the treatment of moral problems is the province of comedy and not of farce, does the play which treats moral problems nonsensically in order to make these problems a source of loud belly-laughter qualify as a comedy or as a farce? Hughes is, of course, aware of these questions and of their essential unanswerability. In distinguishing between farce and comedy one is involved in considerations which necessarily overlap a great deal. Anyone familiar with the problem will be aware that much of what is commonly regarded as great comedy is, in fact, great farce. Many of the most cherished comic scenes in English literature are scenes whose intention to make the audience laugh subsumes such aims as naturalism and moral probing or revela­ tion. A more convincing way to recognize and define farce is to examine its action. Farce consists of the proliferation of action upon action to the point where logical or rational reversion to normalcy is impossible, and it is only by a dramatic explosion that the world of the play can regain a sense of order. In his essay on The Alchemist, Paul Goodman compares this process to the gradual inflation of a balloon, and to its sudden popping when it can take no more air.2 Goodman's use of The Alchemist is tellingly appropriate. Its concluding coup de théâtre which demolishes the insane accumulation of actions can be usefully compared to the explosive end of Ionesco's flagrantly farcical The Chairs where we see matter rather than actions insanely proliferating to a similar point of no rational return. Goodman's argument has in common with the more usual arguments on farce the demonstration of the normality of irrational stage English Studies in Can ad a, iii, 3, Fall 1977 268 occurrence in farcical comic works and its recognition that where comedy sacrifices credibility for social stability, moral rectitude, domestic harmony, or poetic justice, farce sacrifices credibility for laughter alone. As John Mason Brown has put it, we are asked in farce to "accept the impossible as possible, the deranged as normal, and silliness as a happy substitute for sense."3 A further difference between farce and comedy lies in the emphasis upon the moral questions propounded. While it can be argued that in a typical Restora­ tion or eighteenth-century farce the concern of the younger characters to marry and their inability to do so because of a recalcitrant parent is a moral question, and that their ultimate success constitutes the playwright's firm moral state­ ment, it is more likely that the moral question in such a case is a unifying element in the structure of the play and that the chief efforts of the playwright are bent to the end of eliciting laughter. In plays generally accepted as true comedies, while it is impossible to prove an exact purpose, one can say with certainty that it is something more than mere risibility. However ludicrous we might find the actions, we can be sure that the play as a whole cannot adequately be judged by an examination of nothing but its intention to arouse laughter, and the producer who concentrates on this facet alone must needs lose a great deal of the play's meaning. For example, in presenting A Midsummer Night's Dream as a farce, Peter Brook stressed the "low " plot and the physical action while...