Shakespearian And Jonsonian Comedy

Wednesday, April 06, 2005 | 3 comments

A Brief Discussion by

Amna Afzal

[This article can be downloaded as a Word document from here.]


Criticizing Comedy

In comparison with tragedy, the growth and criticism of comedy as a genre is a considerably more complex subject to tackle, as it has been explored in much lesser measure. There may be two reasons for this:

a) The relatively greater profundity of the issues which tragedy deals with; and,
b) Critical discourse on tragedy rests on solid foundations, as Aristotle’s treatise on tragedy is extant while that on comedy has been lost.

The Nature of Comedy

So what, one may ask, constitutes a comedy? What is its nature and purpose? As Sydney has put it:

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he [the dramatist] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

Or to put it another way, its purpose is to create laughter to the end that men’s lesser faults may be made to appear ridiculous and so may be avoided.

Keeping in mind the fact that all artistic endeavors and manifestations of artistic expression are variable with time and place, the following passage covers our present purpose in exploring Elizabethan comedy; to wit,

...the mass of Renaissance comedy is seen to settle itself into some sort of intelligible pattern, if the survey of it is stretched to cover English, Italian, French and Spanish variations of it. In all these countries the problem was similar: it was the attempt to gratify a world-old sense of the comic or ludicrous at the same time as a new sensibility of the romantic.1

Comedy therefore, may be said to cater to two instincts: the sense of the ridiculous and humorous in human life, and the perennial interest in the romantic. This may obviously take a variety of forms, as it did in the European theatres, but the most perfect combination of comedy and romance was achieved in England, not surprisingly especially in the works of Shakespeare.

Elizabethan Comedy

The Elizabethan dramatists were required to produce plays that represented a juxtaposition of what was romantic and comic; this presented some difficulties as the two elements seemed resistant to harmonious amalgamation.

Romance, in its pure form, as found in Medieval literature, focused on chivalric heroes dedicated irrevocably to their loves, overcoming various obstacles and encountering fierce monsters in precarious adventures in order to prove their worth to the loved one. This was the spirit that the Elizabethan dramatists tried to adapt for comic purpose, but something went amiss: they could not make comedy out of romance without undermining the seriousness of affairs of the heart. Inevitably, the comic element predominated, with something a little farcical, even in the inexhaustibility of the hero’s love for the heroine.

The basic plot remains the same: there are people who fall in love, and there are complications in their path, and all is resolved happily in the end; the complications simply take on the nature of farce, with much confusion generated through strange twists and unlikely coincidences.

Shakespeare’s Comedy

Shakespeare comes into his own as a dramatist in his comedies, much more so than in his tragedies, because the comic is congenial to his temperament. Comedy has always been less entrenched by rules than tragedy and so it was in comedy that Shakespeare’s genius achieved its zenith

Shakespeare’s comedy is not satiric; it is poetic. It is not conservative; it is creative. The way of it is that of the imagination, rather than that of pure reason. It is an artist’s vision, not a critic’s exposition.2

Shakespeare is romantic and sentimental; he is all for love, choosing simple tales of wooers and their wooing, ’it was a lover and his lass’.

His comedies, and particularly Twelfth Night, follow much the same pattern. Intrigue, deception, disguise and a surreal atmosphere of unreality seem to recur. Farcical elements, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, are thrown in to compound the comic effect.

In Comedy of Errors, a series of laughable situations arise from the great physical likeness between two characters who are mistaken for each other, and a comparable pattern is found in Love’s Labor Lost. Shakespeare’s more mature comedies, in which Twelfth Night is generally bracketed with Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, evince much the same elements but are more skillfully executed and exhibit a more finished dramatic purpose.

Twelfth Night

The device of confusion of identity seems to have been popular with Elizabethan audiences, which is perhaps why Shakespeare repeats it so often in his comedies. In Twelfth Night, a lady, Viola, disguised as a page, serves the man she loves, Orsino, in the courtship of another woman, Olivia, only to find her rival falling in love with herself. Olivia takes Viola’s twin brother Sebastian to be the object of her love, while he is perplexed at her advances, having never seen her before. With more confusion added in the subplot, with Olivia’s steward, Malvolio, her uncle, and her uncle’s friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who is trying to woo her, plus the smart maid Maria whom Olivia’s uncle ends up wedding, the play is a veritable hotchpotch accentuating the perils of love.

It is all resolved, of course, recalling Rosalind’s shrewdness in resolving the love troubles created in As You Like It. Olivia gets her pageboy after all, in the guise of the pageboy’s twin, who is providentially of the right sex. Orsino returns his page’s love, who conveniently turns out to be a woman.


Jonson’s comedy

Ben Jonson, setting himself apart from the rest of the dramatists, contemptuously said that their comedies had to be of a duke in love with a countess, the countess to be in love with the duke’s son and the son to love the lady’s waiting maid with other such cross wooing. His comedy then, needless to say, had little of the inconsequential and romantic about it.

Jonson felt that comedy, as distinguished from tragedy, in which the remote or the ideal does not hinder and may even help the dramatist’s purpose, had lost its touch of life in romantic extravagance.3

Jonson’s comedy is essentially didactic, recognizing with Sydney that laughter is a means to an end and not an end in itself. We are to be amused, certainly, but not merely to be entertained: we are to recognize ourselves in the follies we are invited to laugh at.

The parts of a comedy are the same with a tragedy, and the end is partly the same. For they both delight and teach.4

As tragedy works out its morality by the effects of pity and fear, so comedy achieves its aim which is also ethical, by mockery of baseness and folly in their lesser degrees, by ’sporting’, as Jonson puts it, ’with follies, not with crimes.’

Volpone

Jonson tells the Universities in the dedication of Volpone that his ’special aim’ is ’to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out, we never punish vices in our interludes.’

What is striking upon reading Volpone is the apparent seriousness with which Jonson regards comedy. For him, comedy is not farce, not pure entertainment, though that too has its place. To him, comedy meant that there would be a wider audience to appeal, and by luring people with the promise of entertainment, he could have them stay to gain instruction.

Volpone is made up of stuff that one would not normally class as being humorous. The vice being castigated is avarice, which leads a character go for as far as being prepared to prostitute his wife and another to disinherit his son. Volpone, in his self indulgence, goes so far as to attempt rape. None of the characters, with the possible exception of Peregrine, are likable, so degenerate are they, so steeped in vice.

The play revolves around Volpone deceiving people who court him for the money they expect to receive at his demise. He extracts valuable presents from them, leading greedy gulls on, expecting to be his sole heir. What starts out as a game ends in serious hurt for all parties concerned. The focus is on vice and corruption in society, the folly of man and the prevalence of sin: hardly comic themes, and yet, Jonson is consummate in his comedic art.


Jonson and Shakespeare: Varying Approaches

Shakespeare’s comedies are, broadly speaking, more good-humored. Both Jonson and his more celebrated contemporary had the acumen to perceive mankind’s folly in all its stark reality, and the skill to put pen to paper to illumine it to best effect. Their manners of doing so, however, are as distinct as their personalities were.

Several elements stand out as being most disparate in Shakespeare and Jonson’s comedic technique:

• Shakespearian comedy lacks an overt didactic purpose, while Jonson’s whole art is predicated on an ethical agenda. Jonson himself claims in his prologue to Volpone,
  
  In all his poems still hath been this measure,
  To mix profit with your pleasure



• Jonson is more satirical:
  
  As for satire, he was committed to it by his conception of the purpose of comedy. The audience must laugh to some end, and the play must deal with some folly and cure it by its ridiculous presentation. A comedy was a ’comical satire,’ as he styled more than one of his plays.5
  
  Shakespeare is not concerned with satire: his vision, if just as piercing, is less judgmental.



• Jonson makes a plea for real life, for ’deeds and language, such as men do use’. He is firmly grounded in the real facts and issues of existence. Shakespeare, on the other hand, transports his audience to Illyrias, lands of fantasy and unreality where anything is possible.


• Jonson is careful to maintain a certain degree of originality in his work: familiar as he was with much literature, he never lifted the plots of his plays from anterior sources. Volpone and Twelfth Night themselves constitute an excellent case in point: Jonson declares in the prologue that the play we are about to see is wholly original, while Twelfth Night apparently has very close parallels in an Italian comedy, Inganni, of the sixteenth century.


• The most striking difference is, of course, Jonson’s lack of concern with the romantic element, while Shakespeare’s comedies are largely built upon romance.


• Shakespeare’s comedies end in all being well, while Jonson is not overly concerned with shielding his audience’s sensibilities.


• Jonson saw language as the mirror to man’s soul: dialogue is of paramount importance. Although, Shakespeare’s language is beautiful (with the possible exception of the earlier comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona), much comic effect is derived from other techniques that Jonson despised.

Conclusion

...Jonson’s mode of drama is properly and intentionally different from Shakespeare’s. Jonson is no more trying to draw complex Shakespearian figures and failing than the later Picasso is trying unsuccessfully to paint embrandt faces...Jonson…is not in the tradition of intimate, human comedy which links Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding, Browning, and Dylan Thomas...but belongs to a more critical and satirical body together with Congreve, Pope, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and T. S. Eliot.6


References

1. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy, p. 17
2. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy
3. G. Gregory Smith, English Men of Letters: Ben Jonson, p. 78
4. Ben Jonson, Discoveries, Chapter VIII
5. G. Gregory Smith, English Men of Letters: Ben Jonson, p. 80
6. David Cock, Introduction to Volpone, p. 13

Wednesday, April 06, 2005 | permalink | 3 comments

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