30/1/07 - English Literature - Shakespeare: Twelfth Night

There is a 20th century perception that tragedy, rather than comedy, is Shakespeare's speciality. Recently, comedy has been opened up to modern literary criticism.

There were two traditions of English comedy inaugurated as dramatic conventions in Elizabethan England. They were Shakespearian comedy and Jonsonian comedy. They were distinct and opposing forms: Shakespeare's are romantic and pastoral, Jonson's satiric and urban; Shakespeare wrote about forgiveness and mercy, Jonson was judgemental in examining vices of humanity, particularly hypocrisy; Shakespeare's comedy is celebratory and festive, about having a good time, promises a better world where marriages are symbolic of hope for the future, while Jonson is didactic, moralistic, underlining the failings of humans, and he purges and punishes the humours; Shakespeare's comedy is a benign interpretation of humanity, while Jonson's is malign.

We will look at comedy and tragedy in contrast. Tragedy clarifies Shakespearian comedy, which might be otherwise confusing.

"The pre-eminence of women [in comedy] doubtless harks back to the festival roots of comedy, those rites of spring in which women played a prominent part. May queens were more common in English villages than May kings. And courtship, the standard situation of romantic comedy, was one of the few situations in which women could, in literary tradition and sometimes in fact, exercise power over men. What is most important to note here is that the elevation of women and servants over their betters, like comedy’s cavalier treatment of the law, was quite at odds with the prevailing social values."
[Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, 1979), pp. 28-28]

"The conventions of tragedy [can] be related to a sense of one’s own life as unique and never to be repeated, each decision and act consequential. Comedy’s lesser stakes and its cast of more ordinary people reflect the obverse; life felt as common and ongoing, an endless stream in which we are participants but not the whole story."
[Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, 1979), p. 41]

Comedies are associated with themes of romance, festivity, marriage, metamorphosis.

Tragedies take the names of the hero, e.g. Othello, Hamlet. They are predominantly men (except Anthony and Cleopatra, and Romeo and Juliet). No comic title takes the name of its hero because comedies are not about one particular thing. Instead, the title is suggestive of mood and tone, it is elusive and general. Tragedy is about isolated individuals; comedy suggests it is about collectivity, sociability, a conveying of the world of drama and the world of the audience. The audience and actors are integrated, e.g. As You Like It. Tragedies are about kings, emperors, princes, noblemen, generals and governors, i.e. socially elevated individuals who are defined by their public roles. Comic protagonists are less socially elevated. It is easier to laugh at characters we look down on. Aristotle outlined in his Poetics that we should look up to tragedic heroes, but down on comic characters. So tragedy is about isolation, and comedy integration and social collectivity. There is no emotional identification for any of the comic characters; for example, there are multiple couples in comedies. Comedy is concerned with what unites humans, and tragedy for what distinguishes them.

"All tragedies are finished by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage."
[Lord Byron, Don Juan, Book III, Canto 9]

"Claudius. ‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father;
But you must know your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness, ‘tis unmanly grief."
[Hamlet Act 1, Scene 2, 87-94]

"Orsino. How now, what news from her?
Valentine. So please my lord, I might not be admitted,
But from her handmaid do return this answer:
The element itself till seven years’ heat
Shall not behold her face at ample view,
But like a cloistress she will veiled walk
And water once her day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine – all this to season
A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh
And lasting to her sad remembrance."
[Twelfth Night Act 1, Scene 1, Lines 22-31]

Claudius adopts the comedic attitude to death - that death should be got over, that one should concentrate instead on the living. There is death at the beginning of Twelfth Night - Olivia's brother. Olivia wants to mourn him for seven years, but this is not normal in comedy. Sure enough, the power of life overcomes her sorrow; Olivia can't keep up her grief. In tragedy, the life of a hero is unique and unrepeatable so their death is tragic. In comedy everyone is identified within a community, so when one person dies the rest carry on.

Next, we will look at romance in Twelfth Night. Shakespeare wrote romantic comedies; he used romance to intersect and shape comedy. The occurrence of a shipwreck is used often in his work. It is a clever plot device for landing characters in places that they otherwise would not be in. The character becomes emotionally, physically and metaphorically dislocated. The comedy is therefore about loss and restoration; exile and return. Chance and adventure.

"Viola. What country, friends, is this?
Captain. This is Illyria, lady.
Viola. And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drowned.
Captain. It is perchance that you yourself were saved.
Viola. O my poor brother! And so perchance may he be.
Captain True madam, and so comfort you with chance."
[Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 1-6]

Illyria is a remote setting; it is exotic, and allows the audience to suspend their beliefs on the purposes of the play. If the setting was nearer to home it would be more unbelievable, but placed far away it is plausible. The characters experience limitations of their destiny. The use of shipwrecks allows Shakespeare to confront the idea that humans can achieve anything. It shows our limitations of power and action. Chance affects us more than we affect it.

"Olivia. I do I know not what, and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.
Fate, show thy force, ourselves we do not owe [own]
What is decreed must be, and be this so."
[Act 1, Scene 5, 298-301]

Olivia voices the thought that fate is the agent of destiny. She surrenders herself to a higher power.

"Viola. I am the man . . .
How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him,
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love,
As I am woman, now alas the day,
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!
O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie."
[Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 15 & 33-41]

Viola also gives herself up to a time agent to sort out the problems she encounters. Time is expressed as a benign helper.

Frye discusses the benevolence of time and fate in comedy.

"The essential drive in comedy is towards liberation, whether of the central character, a pair of lovers, or society, and so comedy has the same narrative shape as many of the programmes in religion that lead towards goals of salvation or enlightenment or beatitude. In Aristotle, where reversal is treated mainly as a structural principle of tragedy, something in an action exceeding the bounds of what is given to the human situation . . . is reversed by the returning power of nature or divine will or opposed human force. Such a reversal operates within the general framework of human law. But the parallels suggested between comedy and myths of deliverance make us wonder whether the typical comical reversal may not transcend the framework of law altogether, as the work of a redeeming or rescuing force opposed to the normal movement of circumstances."
[Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto, 1983), p. 14]

"The drive towards a comic conclusion is so powerful that it breaks all the bonds of probability in the plot, of habit in the characters, even of expectations in the audience, and what emerges at the end is not a logical conclusion of the preceding action, as in tragedy, but something more like a metamorphosis."
[Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York and London, 1965), p. 133]

Reversal of action typically belongs to tragedy, e.g. Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The hero of the tragedy antagonises social forces which leads to his death. There is a reversal in the pre-eminence to his death. The death of the tragic hero is due to natural laws. In comedy reversal operates differently. Natural law, e.g. time, does not reverse situations, but the intervention of fate and chance does, making them seem like superhuman forces. So comic conclusions are not logical, but a metamorphosis.