I am teaching a group of seniors and juniors about Shakespeare’s Comedies. In my last two jobs, the students only read the tragedies unless they elected to take a senior English elective. Yes, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Othello are pinnacles of writing and anguish and yes, those plays contain their moments of comedy. Think of the drunken Porter talking to the stern and Puritanical Macduff about pissing and floppiness. Think of Mercutio taunting Tybalt as “The Prince of Cats.” But for the knowing audience, the laughter echoes blackly.

Let’s read about reunions and forgiveness and love and marriage. Give me the comedies. But even they have their dark moments. In Tempest, Prospero abuses Caliban, making him a salve and pinching him with torments. Prospero also dominates and commands Ariel and threatens to put him back in the cleft of the tree where Sycorax trapped him. In Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio starves Kate to tame her and after reading T.H. White’s book The Goshawk, I know that he models his taming of her on how a falconer would tame a falcon — be starvation and food rewards. In Much Ado about Nothing, Hero is accused publicly of sexual incontinence. What worse fate for a maiden than to be accused of having casual sex. And even the title of the play is violent since “nothing” is Elizabethan slang for a woman’s vagina and it suggests that making the woman’s virginity is not worth noting. Or Measure for Measure where the brother Claudio asks his sister Isabella (who wants to be a nun) to have sex with Angleo so he can be set free. Now what is with that?

When we read the tragedies, the students enter into the plot with no difficulty. Well, the language of Shakespeare is an impediment, but they get the sorrow and the sadness. Of course they understand why Hamlet is despondent when his mother remarries within two months of his father’s death. Of course they understand why Othello feels betrayed by his wife whom he thinks has given his leiutenant his mother’s handkerchief embroidered with strawberries (now are those strawberries a symbol or what? Red fruit on a field of white). They get that Lady Macbeth goes mad from guilt, especially after her husband Macbeth orders the murder of another woman. Might he go for her next since he is out of control?

The comedies seem to require more effort — does that mean that finding happiness is harder?

Let me reframe the question. The comedies end happily because the characters adapt and change and accept. Does that proposition hold?

We just finished studying Twelfth Night in this senior class. I remember the first time I read the play as a first year student in Elizabeth Armstrong’s Shakespeare class. I was the only first year in the class. We read a play a week for two quarters. She spoke to us with only the huge yellow Riverside edition opened on her desk. She would take a breath and launch into her disquisition about each play. She brought my attention to the references to time and the twins (Viola and Sebastian) acceptance of time and its passage. She talked about sprezzaturra and how that flowing resilient grace allows the twins to find their happiness. Viola says:

O time, thou must untangle this, not I:
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. (Act 2, scene 2, ll. 39-40).

Sebastian says,

What relish is in this? How runs the stream?
Or I am mad, or else this is a dream:
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep;
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!
(Act 4, scene 1, ll. 54-57)

After so many years (this class I took in 1982), I don’t remember what she said but I remember how she communicated her excitement about the speeches. She exclaimed and frothed and marveled. She paced back and forth in front of us.

Initial observations on Viola’s speech

When Viola talks she addresses time in the intimate second person singular “thou.” She makes time into a friend and a partner in her situation — shipwrecked on a foreign shore, disguised as a boy, and serving a changeable duke. The two lines has lots of alliteration: time, untangle, too, untie. The alliteration highlights the semantic contrast between “tangle” and “untie.” There is also quite a bit of consonance on the /n/ sound. The iambic stresses of the first line fall on: time, must, tan, this, I. This means that the line balances stress wise between “Time” and “I,” again emphasizing how Viola and Time are  team. The other noteworthy sound patterning is that this is a closed heroic couplet. The rest of the speech is blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter, but it ends with this couplet which creates a partnership between Viola and time. Nowhere else in the soliloquy is Time addressed or even mentioned. Time only comes in at the end of the speech.

Initial observations on Sebastian’s speech

Sebastian’s speech is two paired closed couplets. He is responding to Olivia’s plea that “Cesario” forgive Sir Toby for attacking Sebastian. I think Olivia’s speech is also interesting in terms of rhyme form. She is speaking in blank verse until the last two lines when she says, “Do not deny. Beshrew his soul for me! / He stated one poor heart of mine, in thee” (Act 4, scene 1, ll. 52-53). Then when Sebastian speaks his aside in heroic couplets, even though he is not talking too Olivia, the form of his speech shows that he is falling into line with her. The sense of the lines tells us this because he decides to go with the flow and dream on! The imagery of these four lines includes: streams, sleep, dreams. A person can fight against a stream, struggling against the current. A person can fight sleep, trying to stay away. A person can wake herself up from a dream, opening her eyes. Or a person can do what Sebastian does: accept, bend, succumb, obey, submit. But he does it with a free will. He decides to go along. No one forces him. I wonder if one could talk about his acceptance of this grace which has been granted him in the same way one could talk about a person accepting the grace of God? Or is that too much? I always warn the students about pushing connections too hard but could it be possible? Of course in the scope of comedy. This reminds me of the storm scene in King Lear, when Lear runs out into the storm and accepts its fury, crying “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (Act 3, scene 2, l. 1). But of course King Lear is a tragedy and his acceptance comes too late.