This course will lead students to interrogate the concept and term ‘comedy’ in relation to Shakespeare’s plays. As a generic term, ‘comedy’ has traditionally been understood as ‘a narrative that ends well,’ in tacit opposition to tragedy. Yet, what happens when humour relies on ethically or aesthetically disturbing incidents, images and plots? How close is the relationship between comedy and other genres?
Looking in detail at Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we will consider how comedy may be interrupted, undermined or complicated. Much Ado, though it ends in marriage and is therefore a ‘comedy’ in the strict sense of providing a happy ending, covers a range of disturbing, bizarre, and even ethically problematic interactions that expose the potential for violence in institutions such as the law, the structures of government and, above all, marriage itself. It also features, at its fringes, war and an attempted coup d’état, a faked death and a real broken engagement, and copious instances of treachery and deception. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, likewise, ends with romantic couples neatly paired up, but it too begins in the shadow of warfare, with a prisoner of war forced into marriage and a despotic ruler lending his authority to autocratic parents. To whom – or for whom – are these plays ‘comical,’ and what is at stake when we give them this label?
In exploring this question, we will consider the self-consciousness of these plays as performances. Much Ado features a staged procession of mourners for a faked death, and repeatedly shows its characters consciously playing roles as lovers or antagonists, faithful brothers or faithless mistresses, while other characters arrange themselves as audiences and spectators. The Dream, likewise, gives its young lovers a constant unofficial audience of interested spectators in the forms of Oberon, Titania and their attendants, and it parallels the love story with the struggles of the Rude Mechanicals who rehearse and ultimately present their farcical tragedy of the mutual suicide of Pyramus and Thisbe. To what extent is ‘comedy’ inevitably a matter of perspective?
