The Secret Life of Plays by Steve Waters

Author:Steve Waters [Waters, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780011974
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

Comic Character

A brief survey of comedy offers a movement in the other direction. Comic characters in plays from Lysistrata to What the Butler Saw remain confined to role in order for the plot to predominate. This is evident in the largely ensemble focus of so many comedies – even in those of Shakespeare, who pushes the possibilities of the form to the limit. An early comedy such as The Comedy of Errors, derived from a Plautine farce, might flirt with non-comedic elements – such as the threatened death of the father Egeon in the rather earnest opening, or indeed the darker sentiments of Adriana and Luciana about love and men – but effectively character serves plot. Despite the fact that the drubbings and beatings doled out to both Dromios place them closer to our sympathies, there’s never a question of them exceeding their function as the benighted servant; for Dromio of Syracuse, his experiences of Ephesus don’t disturb the essential interplay between him and his master Antipholus. No one, in fact, aspires to dominate the middle ground of the play; the plot is not driven by aspiration, but by circumstance. Comedy, especially, inhabits a world in which things happen to people, rather than one in which they shape their own destinies.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is likewise constructed around essentially static worlds of character, with only Titania and Oberon within the fairy realm and Nick Bottom threatening to move beyond their orbit. The four lovers, whilst their predicament strips back their civilities to reveal sharper, edgier potential, are ultimately at mercy of the workings of magic and the plot. Bottom might be ‘translated’, but it is only temporarily. The final, socially obnoxious but hilarious act of hymeneal performance in Act Four revels in the separateness of worlds that look dangerously interfused in the previous act. As in Dickens, comedy confines character to predictable tics and gestures; Bottom’s spoonerisms, Puck’s puckishness and Theseus’s serene authority quickly mark them out and equip them to move the plot on. The wonderful, troubling muddle in the midst of the play – as Lysander abandons Hermia, Helena becomes desired by all who see her, Titania falls for Bottom – is funny precisely because it takes static characters briefly out of their confines and compels them to change; the task of the play is then to reverse that utterly.

Irreversible change is not on the agenda for comedy, and therefore complexity in character is not available. Within Shakespeare’s own writing, comedy in its purer forms becomes increasingly untenable, as he applies to it his profound grasp of character. With the pain and travails of figures such as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, we move beyond the closed circuit of comedy derived from farce or Commedia into the dangerous realm of psychological nuance. The late romances are the answer: in plays such as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, remnants of comedy linger on in the darker projects and the complexity of figures such as Prospero and Leontes. Caliban’s aspiration

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