On Reading Shakespeare’s Comedies
At Hildegard College, we’re looking forward to exploring Shakespeare’s As You Like It together at an upcoming Great Works Seminar. The goal of the seminar is to investigate a few of Shakespeare’s themes in-depth. And to that end, here are a few notes on how to read a Shakespearean comedy.
Language
A common misconception is that people spoke like Shakespeare’s characters speak in London at the time. Far from it. What you read on the page is Shakespeare’s attempt to elevate (at times, we might even say “redeem”) the English language through the instrument of poetry. Just like when we go see a Shakespearean play performed and struggle to understand every sentence, Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences would have been challenged.
Shakespeare is always thinking on two levels: the general sense of meaning and action that the audience will have even if they don’t pick up on every detail, and deeper meanings that can be discovered upon reflection. Thus, even though we’re reading these scripts instead of seeing them performed as they were intended to be experienced, we have the opportunity to consider Shakespeare’s grammar, figurative language, sonic presence, and allusions more closely.
Tips:
Read aloud as often as possible, and note the ways things sound.
Attend to the differences between scenes set in verse vs. scenes set in prose (normal looking lines and paragraphs).
Don’t fixate on glosses of words you don’t know. Read a passage uninterruptedly, then go back and check the footnotes for definitions you didn’t pick up on.
Genre
In the English Renaissance, the literary public thought in terms of genres, types of literature and performance. The word they used was “kind”: comedy is a kind of drama, as is tragedy, history, and tragicomedy. Eclogue, sonnet, epic, elegy, and pastoral were kinds of poetry. When a book of poems was published, or when a play was published and sold by a bookseller, the kind of poetry it was was typically made conspicuous. As You Like It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623, the first collected works of Shakespeare published posthumously. And the title of the collection grouped the plays into kinds: Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.
A play’s genre or kind was a template Shakespeare used to enhance meaning. Many qualities of a play can only be detected if one knows the conventions of its genre — in order to see where Shakespeare deviates from the conventions, what he emphasizes, and what inspires him.
Shakespeare’s main models for the genre of comedy were the ancient Roman poet Plautus’s comedies (farcical and banter-driven), Italian comedies (raunchy and flamboyant), and medieval English festal drama. Festal comedy refers to performances outside of commercial theater that emerged organically from the liturgical and agricultural customs of England. Easter, the harvest, Mayday, Whitsuntide, Christmas, the twelfth night of Christmas — each of these and many other seasonal occasions gave rise to civic, religious, and pastoral performances and revelry. This is an especially important backdrop for Shakespeare’s comedies and especially for plays like As You Like It, Love’s Labours Lost, and A Midnight Summer’s Dream because they pit the court or city against the country or forest. These natural settings are meant to evoke liberty, wonder, role reversals, and controlled chaos.
Tips for Reading Genre:
Look for reversals, incidents where the unexpected occurs.
Pay attention to how authority and control shifts from one kind of setting to another.
Respect the fool and the clown. They’re often the most insightful characters.
Take religious and theological language and allusions seriously.
Remember that matters of love are deadly serious, even in a comedy.
Playwrights
As a writer of plays, Shakespeare was known as a “playwright.” Note, not a play-write but a play-wright, like a shipwright. He was a wright, or maker, of plays. It can be helpful to remember that in Shakespeare’s London playwrights were not disembodied intelligences dwelling aloft in an ivory tower sending words down to the masses. They were craftsmen. And their raw materials were words, theater facilities, company props and costumes, and specific players (or actors). Their resources were limited, but playwrights found freedom within the constraints of their materials. This is why seeing a play performed is so superior to simply reading a script or watching a film version; the limitations of the stage and its properties give life to a play.
An interesting example of a playwright using the materials at hand is the character of Feste, played by an actor named Robert Armin. Armin was the “clown” performer of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, at the time that AYLI was first performed (around 1600). To be sure, the part of Feste was written for Armin specifically.
Another category of a playwright’s raw materials for creating drama is cultural. One famous Shakespeare theater historian likes to say that Shakespeare was willing to use any and all cultural material in order to shape meaning and create dramatic situations. This includes not only social references and character types but also serious matters of theology, politics, metaphysics, anatomy, and morality.
Poetics
Poetics is the study and craft of poetry-making. If Shakespeare was a playwright vis-a-vis a play he created, then he was acting secondarily as a poet insofar as his crafted language at the levels of verse, syntax, figuration, sound, and form.
The Renaissance saw a rebirth of poetics. Courtiers, poets, and public intellectuals wrote about the nature of poetry as an art form. And they drew on the classic idea — popularized by Aristotle and the Roman author, Horace — that the point of poetry was twofold: to instruct and to delight. Unlike philosophy and historical writing which both instruct, poetry also delights. But unlike baser forms of entertainment, poetry also aims to instruct.
The way that ancient and Renaissance poets aimed to accomplish this synergy between instructing and delighting was by treating the genres of poetry as emotion-machines of sorts.
Every poem or poetic passage has content that makes claims on reality. What poetry does is to shape one’s emotional response to these claims on reality.
For example, if a character is suffering an injustice and is able to articulate his or her suffering in beautiful language, then the job of the poem is to manipulate its readers or audience to have compassion for this character. We know if a poem is “true” if the way it makes its audience feel toward a subject accurately reflects the nature of that subject. For example, Dante’s Purgatorio is true because it prompts us to feel compassion toward characters who are truly deserving of compassion.
The best way to experience the poetics of a play like As You Like It is to allow yourself to become emotionally invested. Experience the play uncritically. Fall in love with characters. Hate other characters. Laugh at funny moments.
Only after experiencing the poetics of a play can we attend to its poetics critically, by asking the questions, What does Shakespeare make me feel toward what? And, through what devices does he make me feel this? And, ought I to feel this way toward this thing?
For more information and to register for the seminar, click here.
