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The comedy of Shakespeare’s time was very different to our modern comedy. The style and key characteristics of a Shakespeare comedy are not as distinct as the other Shakespearean genres and sometimes determining whether one of his plays is a comedy can be a challenge. Comedy is not necessarily what a modern audience would expect comedy to be. Whilst there may be some funny moments, a Shakespearean comedy may involve some very dramatic storylines. Usually what defines a Shakespearean play as a comedy is that it has a happy ending, often involving a marriage.
Common Features of a Shakespearean Comedy
What makes a Shakespeare comedy identifiable if the genre is not distinct from the Shakespeare tragedies and histories? This is an ongoing area of debate, but many believe that the comedies share certain characteristics, as described below:
- Comedy through language: Shakespeare's comedies are peppered with clever word play, metaphors and insults.
- Love: The theme of love is prevalent in every Shakespeare comedy. Often, we are presented with sets of lovers who, through the course of the play, overcome the obstacles in their relationship and unite. Of course, that measure isn't always foolproofly; love is the central theme of "Romeo and Juliet" but few people would regard that play as a comedy.
- Complex plots: The plots of Shakespeare comedies have more twists and turns than his tragedies and histories. Although the plots are convoluted, they do follow similar patterns. For example, the climax of the play always occurs in the third act and the final scene has a celebratory feel when the lovers finally declare their feelings for each other.
- Mistaken identities: The plot of a Shakespearean comedy is often driven by mistaken identity. Sometimes this is an intentional part of a villain’s plot, as in "Much Ado About Nothing" when Don John tricks Claudio into believing that his fiancé has been unfaithful through mistaken identity. Characters also play scenes in disguise and it is not uncommon for female characters to disguise themselves as male characters.
Shakespeare’s comedies are the most difficult to classify because they overlap in style with other genres. Critics often describe some plays as tragic-comedies because they mix equal measures of tragedy and comedy.
Types of Comedy
- High Comedy can also be called situational comedy, in which the source of humour is the situation of mistaken identity or miscommunication. The would-be lovers, Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius, retreat into the forest to escape Hermia's sentence to marry Demetrius or be banished from Athens. Hermia wants Lysander, and Helena is pursuing Demetrius. This type of high comedy was very popular in Shakespeare's time: the humour of troublesome situations and how to talk one's way out of them.
- Low Comedy involves silliness, inappropriateness, and sometimes references that can be taken as vulgar or sexual. Rude Mechanicals, six rough and uneducated tradesmen who have decided to put on a performance in honour of the royal wedding. The entire thing is something of a farce: the play is Pyramus and Thisby , a sad tale of ill-fated lovers ending in tragedy. Completely inappropriate for a wedding dinner, it is also acted
in a ridiculous and exaggerated manner by the six buffoonish ruffians. Their rehearsal provides the low comedy of the play.
- Slapstick is physical humour - action rather than dialogue. The humour really begins when the fairies get involved. Oberon wants Puck to straighten out the dilemma of the four lovers with love juice , but Puck enchants the wrong man. Now the tension is higher than ever among the two couples, even descending into a girl fight between Hermia and Helena. Here is our example of slapstick physical comedy.
- Shakespearean Comedy is the fast-paced, witty banter we see in all of Shakespeare's comedic plays: clever dialogue and play-on-words, often delivered in a dramatic manner. Shakespeare reserves some of the best dialogue for his warring lovers, especially Oberon and Titania, and even the "rude mechanicals" manage to wow us with their clever banter.
Comedy
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a classic example of Shakespearean comedy. What, you don't believe us? We'll prove it to you. We've got a checklist that details all the typical conventions and features of the genre, so you can see for yourself:
Light, humorous tone: Check. The play features fairy magic (like Oberon's love potion), silly pranks (like the transformation of a guy's head into that of a jackass), and the botched performance of a play-within-a-play by a bunch of wannabe actors. Need we say more?
Clever dialogue and witty banter: Check. Shakespeare is a huge fan of puns and snappy wordplay, so naturally his characters know how to get their witty repartee on. Shakespeare reserves some of the best dialogue for his warring lovers, especially Oberon and Titania, and even the "rude mechanicals" manage to wow us with their clever banter.
Deception and disguise: Let's see… Hermia and Lysander try to sneak away from Athens to elope (behind Egeus's back). Also, Titania and the young lovers have no idea they've been drugged by Oberon and his magic love juice. So, check.
Mistaken identity: Check... sort of. In most of Shakespeare's other comedies, someone usually runs around in a disguise to mask his or her identity. (Sometimes, a lover is even tricked into sleeping with the wrong person by mistake.) This isn't necessarily the case in A Midsummer Night's Dream , unless we count the fact that the love juice causes Titania to fall head over heels in love with an "ass." In other words, Titania mistakes Bottom for a creature who is worthy of her love and affection. The same can be said of the other lovers who are dosed with Oberon's magic love potion.
Multiple plots with twists and turns: Check. There are several lines of action in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Shakespeare invites us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. The first plotline involves Theseus and Hippolyta's upcoming wedding. The second plotline involves the young Athenian lovers who run around the wood in confusion. The third follows Oberon's tiff with his wife, Titania. And as a fourth plotline, Shakespeare works in a bunch of craftsmen (the Mechanicals), who plan to perform a play at Theseus's big, fancy wedding.
Love overcomes obstacles: Check. From the play's very beginning, Shakespeare beats us over the head with this idea. Seriously. The only reason Theseus is even engaged to Hippolyta is because he conquered her people (the Amazons) and basically won her in battle. Just a few moments after we hear about Theseus and Hippolyta, we learn that Hermia and Lysander must also overcome a major obstacle if they want to be together because Hermia's dad wants her to
escape from Athenian tyranny. Although the lovers have one foot in the conventional world of Athens, the play forces them to confront their own irrational and erotic sides as they move temporarily into the forest outside of Athens. By the end of the play, though, they return to the safety of Athens, perhaps still remembering some of the poetry and chaos of their night in the forest. This irrational, magical world is the realm of the play's third group of characters: the fairies. Ruled by Titania and Oberon, the enchanted inhabitants of the forest celebrate the erotic, the poetic, and the beautiful. While this world provides an enticing sojourn for the lovers, it is also dangerous. All of the traditional boundaries break down when the lovers are lost in the woods. Finally, the adventures of Quince, Bottom, and the other amateur actors compose the play's fourth plot layer.
Shakespeare dexterously weaves these four worlds together, by having characters wandering in and out of each other's world, by creating echoes and parallels among the different groups. For example, the themes of love and transformation reverberate through all levels of the play, creating coherence and complexity.
THEMES
Love
The dominant theme in A Midsummer Night's Dream is love, a subject to which Shakespeare returns constantly in his comedies. Shakespeare explores how people tend to fall in love with those who appear beautiful to them. People we think we love at one time in our lives can later seem not only unattractive but even repellent. For a time, this attraction to beauty might appear to be love at its most intense, but one of the ideas of the play is that real love is much more than mere physical attraction.
Magic
The fairies’ magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysander’s eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he reshapes Bottom’s head into that of an ass and recreates the voices of Lysander and Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage their play.
Dreams
As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; they are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Hippolyta’s first words in the play evidence the prevalence of dreams (“Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four nights will quickly dream away the time”), and various characters mention dreams throughout (I.i.7–8). The theme of dreaming recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain bizarre events in which these characters are involved: “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he goes about expound this dream,” Bottom says, unable to fathom the magical happenings that have affected him as anything but the result of slumber.
Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the fairies in the magical forest. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream.
Order and Disorder
A Midsummer Night's Dream also deals with the theme of order and disorder. The order of Egeus' family is threatened because his daughter wishes to marry against his will; the social order to the state demands that a father's will should be enforced. When the city dwellers find themselves in the wood, away from their ordered and hierarchical society, order breaks down and relationships are fragmented. But this is comedy, and relationships are more happily rebuilt in the free atmosphere of the wood before the characters return to society.
SYMBOLS
The Moon The dominant imagery in A Midsummer Night's Dream revolves around the moon and moonlight. The word moon occurs three times in the play's first nine lines of the play, the last of these three references in a most striking visual image: "the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven." One reason for repeating such images is to create the atmosphere of night. Shakespeare's plays were mostly performed by daylight, and he had to create the idea of darkness or half-light in the imagination of his audience — there were no lights to turn off or to dim. In addition, these repeated moon references work upon the audience by creating a dreamlike atmosphere. Familiar things look different by moonlight; they are seen quite literally in a different light. The moon itself is also a reminder of the passage of time.
Theseus and Hippolyta
Theseus and Hippolyta bookend A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appearing in the daylight at both the beginning and the end of the play’s main action. They disappear, however, for the duration of the action, leaving in the middle of Act I, scene i and not reappearing until Act IV, as the sun is coming up to end the magical night in the forest. Shakespeare uses Theseus and Hippolyta, the ruler of Athens and his warrior bride, to represent order and stability, to contrast with the uncertainty, instability, and darkness of most of the play. Whereas an important element of the dream realm is that one is not in control of one’s environment, Theseus and Hippolyta are always entirely in control of theirs. Their reappearance in the daylight of Act IV to hear Theseus’s hounds signifies the end of the dream state of the previous night and a return to rationality.
The Love Potion
The love potion is made from the juice of a flower that was struck with one of Cupid’s misfired arrows; it is used by the fairies to wreak romantic havoc throughout Acts II, III, and IV. Because the meddling fairies are careless with the love potion, the situation of the young Athenian lovers becomes increasingly chaotic and confusing (Demetrius and Lysander are magically compelled to transfer their love from Hermia to Helena), and Titania is hilariously humiliated (she is magically compelled to fall deeply in love with the ass-headed Bottom). The love potion thus becomes a symbol of the unreasoning, fickle, erratic, and undeniably powerful nature of love, which can lead to inexplicable and bizarre behaviour and cannot be resisted.
The Craftsmen’s Play
