Twinship and Occult References in Twelfth Night

7 5 R T H E G R E A T T R A D I T I O N I N C O M E D Y K E N L U D W I G There is a ‘‘Great Tradition’’ in dramatic comedy in English which begins with Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, and continues to the present day. It is a specific form of drama, as defined and ritualized in its way as the Noh drama of Japan or the masked drama of Greek tragedy. It is not social comedy or the comedy of manners. It is not satire, and it is not mere farce. It does not include some of the best comedies ever written, such as The Alchemist in the seventeenth century and Private Lives in the twentieth. The comedies in the great tradition are simply di√erent in kind from other plays and represent a specific way of looking at the world and expressing it on the stage. Following Shakespeare, the great tradition shows up intermittently , sometimes with many decades between sightings. The titles of the plays themselves may not mean much, but let me name them first and then describe what binds them together, thus allowing them to be called a tradition. The first time we spot the great tradition after Shakespeare is at the end of the Restoration period in the works of John Vanbrugh, particularly in his plays The Relapse and The Provoked Wife. These 7 6 L U D W I G Y are followed closely in the early 1700s by two comedies by George Farquhar, The Recruiting O≈cer and The Beaux’ Stratagem. What we see in all these plays is the loosening up of the strict conventions of the earlier Restoration comedies, those ‘‘aren’t-we-terriblywitty -as-we-talk-of-nothing-but-mistresses-and-cuckolding’’ sorts of plays by George Etherege and William Congreve (brittle and brilliant though they certainly are). In Vanbrugh, good nature beginstoreturntothetheater.Therearestillfops,buttheybeginto laugh at themselves and so bring light into the room. And in Farquhar, where the plays are set in the country instead of the town,thereisanewworldofcharacterstoenjoy,fromhighwaymen to rowdy innkeepers. The next notable instances of this comic tradition appear clustered in the last third of the eighteenth century. They begin with David Garrick and George Colman’s buoyant The Clandestine Marriage (which was made into a commercial movie in 2001), and Garrick’s own The Lying Valet, which has gone largely unappreciated for the past two hundred years. It is worth remembering that Garrick was as great a comedian as he was a tragedian and that one of his most famous roles was that of Lord Brute, the man who puts on a dress in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife. Next, in 1773, comes Oliver Goldsmith’s triumphant masterpiece She Stoops to Conquer, followed closely by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), then John O’Kee√e’s Wild Oats in 1791. I am not certain if it has ever been appreciated as such, but the thirty-year period from the mid-1760s to the mid-1790s is second only to Shakespeare’s heyday as the high point of dramatic comedy in the English language. (Notice that I did not say ‘‘by English authors’’ since most of the plays were by Irishmen.) This period is followed by a long hiatus until Dion Boucicault wrote the youthful, zesty London Assurance in the early 1840s. His leading character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, is obviously a direct descendant of Vanbrugh’s Lord Foppington and, if anything, is even more hilarious. Then, at the end of the century came George Bernard Shaw – who loved to mock the great tradition and call it hooey while at the same time paying homage to it – and finally Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which came, saw, and conquered the great tradition and set it on its head. Among T H E G R E A T T R A D I T I O N I N C O M...