Texts: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, All’s Well, that Ends Well
From the very beginning of his career Shakespeare was a bold and prolific comedic innovator, rapidly abandoning classical dramatic models for a far messier, Ovidian comedy of rural transformation inhabited by character-types from many sources. This course takes four plays from different stages of his comedic career and traces both what he did and how he did it.
The earliest surviving comedies, The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, are a study in contrasts. Errors is closely based on Roman twin-plays, and where Ben Jonson refused to write drama about twins because he ‘could never find two actors so alike the audience could be persuaded they were one’, Shakespeare cheerfully doubled the number of twins and did it anyway. But he only did it once, and though Two Gents is in many ways a mess, and far more rarely performed than Errors, it has within that mess all the major elements of what we know as Shakespearean comedy—the love-quadrangle, the contrast of first and green worlds, and the cross-dressed heroine’s journey—as well as the first scripted part for a dog in English drama.
Written in the middle of his career, As You Like It raises that model to an outrageously pure comedic perfection that Jaques denounces from within the play, and that the witty title and epilogue cheerfully mock. But in the first decade of the 17th century, as Elizabethan turned to Jacobean, Shakespeare’s writing darkened, with tragedy predominant, and in his last comedies before the late plays (or ‘romances’) the atmospheres and outcomes were very different—as the humours and challenges of All’s Well, that Ends Well attest. But odd and troubling as that play may be, it plainly deploys in yet another new configuration the same comedic elements to renewed comedic purpose.
From the high metatheatrics and low jokes of Launce in Two Gents to the bed-trick of All’s Well Shakespeare’s comedy grew and evolved by achieving astonishingly disparate results with a very consistent set of ingredients, for ever being tumbled and tweaked into new combinations and juxtapositions. Tracing that evolution across fifteen years of his dazzling dramatic career reveals a great deal about far more than comedy.
