How to Read Shakespeare, Part 5: Comedy
A Revel Song
This is the fourth part in a series on Reading Shakespeare. Links to the other parts are at the end of the post. I teach at Hildegard College, a new college of liberal arts and entrepreneurship. Check us out here: https://www.hildegard.college/
Now to the matter:
Socrates joins a group of men to celebrate his friend Agathon’s victory in poetry at the Athenian festival for Dionysius. As Socrates’s social gatherings tend to go, the conversation turns philosophical and specifically to the subject of love. From this gathering, we get the wonderful dialogue, Symposium.
The party is memorably interrupted by the infamous statesman, Alcibiades, who is said to barge in to the song of a flute, wearing a garland of ivy and flowers on his head, already well drunk. We’re told that the symposium members first hear “a sound of revelers.” Plato’s word is κωμαστῶν, from the word kōmos. But a kōmos was more than a revel. It was the name given to the ritualistic revel march that took place at the beginning of the same festival at which Agathon won a prize for poetry, the Dionysia. This festival is the holiday that hosted competitions for tragic and comedic drama, the same from which we get the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes (who was in company at Agathon’s symposium).
Festivals and revels had a special place in Greek culture. A good poetic song was thought to cause a state of frenzy induced by the muse for which the singer was a medium of sorts. Tragedy, says Aristotle in the Poetics, descended from this musical frenzy-making genre of song. And while we don’t have Aristotle’s writing on comedy, we can safely infer that it too came from this tradition.
Just as ancient Greek tragedy emerged from the symbolism of sacrifice and collective concern over the city that dedicated this festival to Dionysius, comedy served to extend the suspension of normal social rules into an imagined revelry (or kōmos) through which the citizens of Athens could exercise the value they could celebrate the important roles of desire and subversion. Comedy likely derives from a combination of kōmos and the word for song, ōidḗ. Comedy is a revel song.
There was no opposition between the debauchery of the occasion and the seriousness or even sacredness of the art. On the contrary, the festive nature of Greek comedy was essential to honoring Dionysius himself, the god of wine, agriculture, and fertility.
In a word, comedy came from sacred revelry — of a kind that is foreign to us today but lives on, usually unnoticed, in the arts.
What kind of Comedy did Shakespeare know?
There are three traditions through which Shakespeare built his comedies: the classical, the festive, and the liturgical. Comedy has a remarkably complex but magical ancestry, synthesized through historical happenstance and largely through Christian theology.
1. Classical Comedy
Shakespeare was more familiar with Roman drama than he was with Greek. And Terence and Plautus would have been the Roman comedic dramatists with whom he was more familiar.
All of the twists and turns, ironic discoveries, subplots, and disguises we associate with Shakespeare’s comedies have their origin in the work of Terence and Plautus. Shakespeare didn’t just access them directly though — or I should say this wasn’t the only way he encountered this classical tradition of comedy. English Renaissance playwrights were familiar with the tradition in Italy, which played up the amorous notes of classical comedy.
But Italian comic drama provided another important influence. The Italians wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and kept those ideas alive, especially the ideas involving poetic justice and irony, both of which came to a head during a moment of recognition. A chappy named Lodovico Castelvetro wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s work that was particularly influential. But others, including poets like Petrarch, did their part to keep the tradition alive. The result was that Italy gave English poets a kind of template from which to build a distinctly English tradition.
…And build a distinctly English comedic tradition they did.
2. Festive Comedy
In most ways, drama disappeared in Europe during the middle ages. In the late days of the old Roman Empire, theater became a pretty gnarly spectacle, focusing on the baser and more graphic aspects. So as Europe became Christianized, these plays fell out of favor. Not all drama disappeared, of course, but most of the big performances on civic scale did. And the classical stuff — tragedy and comedy that followed traditional rules — was not in vogue.
When theater came back to Europe, it wasn’t through the rehabilitation of the amphitheater but in predominately agricultural communities and their local customs. In England, this was the stuff of jolly ol’ England. The Mayday festival and dancing around the Maypole. The hobby horse. Harvest festivals and Lammas celebrations. Corn dolls. These were celebrations attached to the changing of seasons. Many integrated with Christian practices, but they also had a life of their own.
This is the festive source of English comedic drama. The commercial playhouse in Elizabethan England was much more raucous and playful than today’s dim-lit theaters represent. Music permeated the playhouse, both inside in the jig and stage musicians and outside with balladeers singing the songs whose broadsheets they pawned on the street. There was a company Clown (you see him listed in the dramatis personae of early printed plays), who was sort of like the master of ceremonies, often coming on at the end to lead the jig dance.
Shakespeare had a soft spot for this festival tradition. Think of the forest of Arden As You Like It, or the woods outside of Athens in Summer’s Dream. Or remember the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter’s Tale, where the Clown himself sings ballads and characters laden with flowers dance.
The festive aspect of Shakespeare’s comedies lent an atmosphere of license, celebrated amorousness, often hinted at the subtle magic of the countryside, and acted as a counterpoint to the politics and commerce of the city and court.
The festive drew on the pastoral tradition, where shepherds played pipe flutes and sung poems in the grazing fields. This tradition contained an inherent critique of urbanization and the corruption of institutions, including that of the church. The festive was a world of art and holiday full of subtext and subtle messages.
2. Liturgical Comedy
Christian worship always followed a sort of drama of prayer — acknowledge God, confess your sins, receive grace, dedicate yourself, feast. It used song, prayer, call-and-response, recitation, and dramatic listening.
So it was only natural that as classical theater was on hiatus during the medieval period, drama would emerge organically within the church.
Liturgical drama is one way to describe some of these developments. At certain important times in the Christian year — especially Passiontide, Eastertide, and Christmas — the church services celebrating the biblical events of these seasons gradually became more dramatic, even employing characters and spoken parts.
A watershed moment was the inauguration of the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264, celebrating the miracle of the body of Christ in communion. What it did for the development of theater was astounding. Since it centered on a sacramental event in the eucharist, the liturgy and its surrounding festival was intrinsically incarnational. By that, I mean that purposely bridged the seen and the unseen, the felt and the unfelt. First, there was a procession of the consecrated Host around the church property. Then there was a passion play performed at the end of the procession. Later, this passion play grew into multiple plays. And ultimately, through twists and turns in different regions especially in England, there grew an entire three-day play festival which we know as Corpus Christi plays or Mystery Plays. In their fullest forms, they were festivals with multiple stages on which city guilds each performed one of a couple dozen episodes from the Bible, beginning with Creation and ending the the Final Judgment.
From this tradition, and concurrent with it, emerged all sorts of Christian dramatic forms. There was a new license, so to speak, for drama, given by the late medieval Christian appreciation for how “living pictures” could represent sacred stories.
We can align this tradition with the history of comedy specifically, first, because of its festive aspect, and second, because it followed the narrative trajectory of what we might call “divine comedy.” The story of God’s interactions with humans was a comedic one — not humorous but ending with reconciliation and the hope for future happiness.
Shakespearean Comedy: Classical, Festive, Liturgical
Shakespeare’s plays incorporated all three of these traditions.
Twelfth Night is a good example. It uses the long-lost family member and recognition tropes of classical comedy. It is festive in its use of the Clown and the revelry of its lower-class characters. And it is liturgical in its narrative form and even in its title. The “twelfth night” refers to the twelfth night of Christmas, the night before the Feast of the Epiphany.
Epiphany in part celebrated the coming of the three magi to Christ’s nativity and so commemorated the extension of salvation to all peoples, including pagans. Celebrations of the twelfth night of Christmas ran with this aspect of the feast. People would dress up, drink, and party in the streets. It was the only occasion during the year when the general population could masquerade as royalty or even as clergy and get away with it. It’s because of this topsy-turvy element that Shakespeare named his play “Twelfth Night, or What you will.”
But even more than the name of the play, this and other comedies incorporate the religious-festive spirit of occasions like the twelfth night of Christmas. There was a certain license afforded to them. And what might otherwise be thought of simply as debauchery pointed to a higher meaning that, in a sense, sanctified the play. To be sure, Shakespeare’s commercial plays were “secular” in the sense that they were performed for commercial and entertainment reasons, notwithstanding the great amount of religious content in the plays. But remember, our divisions between sacred and secular did not exist then as they do today.
The Comic Cycle
So how does this classical, festive, and liturgical history of comedy make us better readers of Shakespeare?
The three traditions converge to create a pattern that Shakespeare favored, what I call a comic cycle. And it goes like this:
The play starts with a status quo in which a universal human experience is under threat. Usually this universal human experience is love — romantic love or love between family members or friends. It’s under threat typically because of the corruption of people in power, or even because of complacency.
And so this universal human experience is broken. Often, it’s broken through the severing of social ties, like in As You Like It, or the breaking of family ties, as in Summer’s Dream, or simply through a kind of manipulation like in Much Ado. As a result, relationships cannot function. Love is unattainable. Families and friendships are on the brink of losing themselves forever.
In some way or another, the universal human experience is given over to revelry. This is represented by the power that is suddenly given to outcasts or lower-class characters. Sometimes they’re wild or foolish. Sometimes a noble person himself will move to the forest. And sometimes, as in Summer’s Dream, this revelrous group is not lower but actually higher, like the fairies.
Finally, control of this universal human experience is given back to the characters who had it before, and it’s celebrated with marriage. It’s this reinstating of the institution (like marriage or court) that really completes the comic cycle because comedies are not about subverting systems for the sake of disruption but for the sake of restoration.
The comic cycle is not a formula but more of a description of what typically happens. But the way that it organizes revelry and social relationships and power mirrors what we see in the convergence of the classical, festive, and liturgical forbearers.
When reading comedies, look for these elements. What is the universal human experience under threat? What causes its dysfunction at the beginning? How is it turned on its head, and who takes control of it? And by what means is it restored to the people who first had it? Pay attention also to deviations from this pattern — but those only exist for people who see the pattern to begin with.
If you haven’t read them, check out the other parts of this series: