The Range of Shakespeare's Comedy

Abstract

HE man who talks about the nature of comedy does a dangerous thing, and he knows it, for his reading in the criticism of Be many times and places suggests to him that he has a very slim chance of making sense. Still, it seems best to begin with the general and to say that the difference between tragedy and Avtr e w~ comedy has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with subject matter. Tragedy and comedy are different ways of looking at life, and Shakespeare used both tragedy and comedy in his attempt to look at the whole of it. There is no other dramatist of whom this is true to a comparable degree, and I know of no theory of comedy which begins to comprehend his comic achievement. What is comedy? Well, to the man in the street a comedy is a play which is to some considerable extent funny; and he is, of course, right. That is what comedy is, and everybody, or almost everybody, knows it. But this is a view which marks off the common man from the tradition of learned commentators on comedy, especially from the vast majority of those of Shakespeare's day. Sir Philip Sidney, whose affinity with comedy was negligible, remarks that comedians think there is no delight without laughter, which is very wrong... .And he goes on to say that hath only a scornful tickling. To him laughter was an unsympathetic enjoyment; that is, we laugh only at things for which we feel some scorn. Yet he would not deny that laughter and delight may go well together. Ben Jonson tells us in Timber that Aristotle rightly says, the moving of laughter is a fault in This is the learned Jonson speaking, and it stands for the kind of nonsense which learned men in general commit themselves to when writing on comedy. The complete Jonson, the man who wrote the plays, knew better; but in Timber he is being a critic, and he writes as half a This is the besetting weakness of much criticism. It tends to select those aspects of a subject it feels capable of criticizing, while pretending that the other aspects do not exist. Jonson goes so far as to say, Philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man. There is a good deal of good writing on individual comedies, but almost always when a man sits down to write seriously on the nature of comedy, he writes with a desperate resolve, saying the things which no sensible man, all his faculties in control, has ever thought, though they have often been well expressed. Plato has Socrates say that important people in public life should laugh as little as possible, but he is not speaking for himself. This is advisory. He knew how readily the public man's constituents confuse gravity with wisdom. In Cratylus Socrates remarks in passing that the gods, too, love a joke; but these are pagan gods, and no one, as far as I know, has spoken for our own. Although in his Laws Plato commits himself to the belief that comedy is either satirical or