2 August 1964
From Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1964, ed. B.W. Jackson (Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1965), 1–9. Frye was speaking at the first seminar for attendees of the 1964 season of plays at the Shakespearean Festival at Stratford, Ontario, 2–8 August. His was the first lecture, given on Sunday evening in the Festival Theatre before 157 people. The productions for that year included, besides the Shakespearean tragedies Richard II and King Lear, Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeoman of the Guard, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
This year, besides the two major Shakespeare performances, there are four non-Shakespearean productions, all of them varieties of comedy. It seemed to me that, when you had so many distinguished critics to introduce you to King Lear, what I could most usefully do would be to speak about comedy, referring to what we are going to see this week, but keeping in mind the fact that Shakespeare is central to our interests. It seems to me that in this ironic age comedy is greatly underestimated and misunderstood, except in its ironic form, which on the whole was not Shakespeare’s form.
There are two forms of literary experience which are based on the limitations of human life: these are the tragic and the ironic. The fundamental conception of tragedy is that of the primary contract between man and the state of nature: that great bond, as Macbeth calls it, between human and natural order.1 Some underlying mystery, whether we call it the gods, fate, or the psychology of revenge, operates to keep this order in a roughly balanced state: the rough balance called by the Greeks ananke, moira, or, in a different context, nemesis. The fundamental conception of irony is the social contract properly speaking, the secondary contract between the individual and his society. The state of nature for man is a social state, hence there is always an ironic component of tragedy. But tragedy focuses on the hero, the man at the top of the social scale; irony as such focuses on the victim of society. Tragedy is concerned with Lear and Oedipus; irony with Willy Loman and Tess Durbeyfield. Tragedy is Adam, the king of men, driven from Eden into the wilderness; irony is Israel in bondage to Egypt, and finding in the wilderness its path of escape.
Similarly, there are two forms of literary experience that are based on the conception of the emancipating of human life from these contracts. They are the comic and the romantic. The romance tends to be anti-tragic in the sense that it stresses the unity of man and nature, idyllic, pastoral, or paradisal forms of society, and a heroism that preserves its innocence. It throws the emphasis on individual and sexual rather than social fulfilment. The fundamental conception of romance, therefore, is deliverance from the primary or tragic contract between man and an indifferent or hostile nature. Comedy is anti-ironic in its tendency, and moves from a constricting or absurd society to a more sensible and workable set of social relationships. The more ironic the comedy, the more frustrated or ambiguous this movement becomes, but its structure can still be traced in everything that preserves the festival ending, in feast or marriage or dance or general chorus, which is so typical of comedy. The idea of comedy, then, is emancipation from a confining form of social contract into one that confines less.
The simplest form of comic structure is the one in which a young man wishes to marry a young woman, with the sympathy of the audience, but is prevented from doing so by some sinister or absurd social situation. Such a comedy demands a minimum of four characters: the hero, the heroine, the person originally possessing the heroine who is to be outwitted, and who is usually the gull or butt of the comic action, and the character who helps the hero do the outwitting. This last character was a tricky slave in Roman comedy; later he became a clever servant or valet like the Jeeves of P.G. Wodehouse.
I take Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville, written in the eighteenth century, as an example of this simple type of comedy. Here the heroine, Rosina, is in the care of an older man, Don Bartolo, her guardian, who is insanely jealous of her and proposes to complete his possession of her by marrying her. Thus he has most of the traditional attributes of this role. As her guardian he is in a parental relation to her, and resembles the heavy fathers of all such comedies from Menander to Molière and beyond. As her suitor he is the hero’s foolish or repellent rival. As jealous lover he is her keeper or jailer, like the pimp of Roman comedy. The hero, Count Almaviva, enlists the help of the clever and resourceful barber Figaro, whose song about his cleverness in Rossini’s opera based on the play, “Largo al factotum,” is perhaps the apotheosis of the tricky slave in literature.2 In those days a barber was supposed to do minor medical repair jobs as well, and Figaro has the entrée to the Bartolo household. He gives one servant a sleeping powder, another a sneezing powder, bleeds the housekeeper in the foot on some pretext so that she is unable to walk; he even blindfolds the family mule. Finally, when he has the entire household immobilized, he sends Count Almaviva in various disguises to woo Rosina. One of these disguises is that of her substitute music teacher. The Count protests that this will never fool Don Bartolo, as it is a stale and outmoded device of stage comedies. He is, of course, quite right: the device had been used in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew two centuries earlier, and was not new then. But the conventions of comedy are much more durable than the facts of life: the devices do work, and the Count carries off Rosina in triumph.
In the sequel to The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, on which Da Ponte and Mozart based the opera we are hearing this week, the structure is essentially the same but more complex in its overtones. Here Count Almaviva has been married to Rosina for years, is bored with his own happiness, and has his eye on Figaro’s own fiancée, Susanna. This means that he now has the role of comic butt, the absurd older man or rival who is to be outwitted, whereas Figaro is hero as well as tricky slave. Here, however, we notice an underlying social tension caused by the fact that Figaro is a servant and the Count his master. The Count soliloquizes indignantly about the effrontery of a mere servant in trying to thwart his lordly will. Figaro, in his turn, has a soliloquy in which he inquires what the Count has ever done except get himself born, while he has to work hard for what little he has. He goes on to tell the story of his life, and says that he was a journalist for a time in Spain, and promptly found himself in prison. After release, he was told that the laws had just been greatly liberalized, and that now, as long as he said nothing about politics or the government, nothing about religion, nothing about theatre or opera or the arts, nothing about anybody at all who was active in anything, he was at perfect liberty to write what he liked, under the supervision of two or three censors. This, of course, was pretty inflammatory talk for prerevolutionary France, and Louis XVI, who saw the play, is said to have remarked, in an unconsciously prophetic flash, that before such plays could be rendered harmless the Bastille would have to be destroyed. So when Da Ponte and Mozart made their opera, the play itself was still under ban. The censorship speech was replaced in the opera by an aria, sung by Don Basilio, about an ass’s skin, so innocuously allegorical that I have never quite understood it.3
These comedies illustrate the main principles of comic structure, and we find the same principles also in Shakespeare. The theme of deliverance from a constricting or binding social contract may take two forms: the form of an absurd law in society itself, or the form of some perverse obsession on the part of someone who is in a position to block the action. In The Marriage of Figaro the absurd law takes the form of the legendary droit du seigneur, which may not have existed historically but is most useful to a comic dramatist. The Count has abrogated this law, but regrets his own generosity, and wishes to make an exception of Susanna. Thus the irrational law has become a private whim but without changing the comic structure. In Molière the obstacle to the love interest is usually an obsession in the mind of the heroine’s father, who may be a miser, a hypochondriac, or the gull of a hypocrite. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme the particular obsession of the heroine’s father is, of course, to be a gentleman in the technical seventeenth-century sense of that word, and shows the typical Molière structure very clearly. The same themes are frequent in Shakespeare, who prefers the irrational law, as Ben Jonson prefers the obsession, which he calls a “humour.” In As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale the comic conclusion is blocked by the whim of a tyrant; elsewhere, as in Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice, by some grotesque and preposterous law.
We notice that the law, even in a very light-hearted comedy, may carry with it an inherent cruelty and viciousness that sometimes threatens to upset the comic tone. The Comedy of Errors begins with a speech of a man under sentence of death, and the threat of death hangs over him for nearly the whole play. Shylock’s bond is not without sharp teeth, and Measure for Measure is preoccupied with the theme of violent and cruel death, which overshadows all the male characters in turn. In The Yeomen of the Guard the hero is similarly under sentence of death, and the atmosphere of menace and torture generated by the Tower of London is never wholly dispelled. An unpleasant streak of sadism in Gilbert himself undoubtedly intensifies this, but its presence is in accord with the normal comic structure. But while social change, in the direction of improvement, is a central theme of comedy, only a minority of comedies are revolutionary even in the very limited way that The Marriage of Figaro is. The change is from a bogey world to a world where young people have a chance to live happily ever after, and which, because it is that, has to be left socially undefined.
Similarly, the comic action may run into an equivocal conclusion. In the conventional structure, the sinister or absurd character is baffled, the hero and heroine, and often several other pairs as well, move toward a quiet consummation offstage, and the tricky slave is rewarded, or sometimes, in the Roman comedies where he really was a slave, set free. But a number of things may complicate this simple progression and turn it into something more ironic. There may be a suggestion that in the final marriages not all the human tensions have been resolved, and that the fairy-tale formula about living happily ever after may not be going to cover them. Thus in Much Ado and All’s Well we wonder if Claudio and Bertram are really good enough for the women they marry; in Measure for Measure we wonder if Angelo will really make a much better husband than Lucio, granted a very different temperament; in As You Like It we wonder, with Jaques, how long the Audrey–Touchstone ménage will last; we may even wonder in Twelfth Night whether Sir Toby’s enormous act of condescension in marrying Maria is really quite that. Again, in The Yeomen of the Guard the festive ending and the multiple marriages are corroded by a much more ironic tone, a sense that they are not quite the marriages that all those engaged in them want to make.
Or, again, our attention may be called to some character who does not join the festivity, but remains isolated from it, and by his isolation suggests other than festive feelings. Sometimes this character is a kind of comic spirit or mischief-maker, a “vice” as at one time he was called, like Puck or Ariel in Shakespeare. Sometimes he is an Eros-figure who represents in himself the fundamentally sexual drive of comedy, like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, whose role in the opera is half male and half female, a wistful impulse to love that has not broken out of self-love and found its identity. The heroines disguised as boys in Shakespeare, a device recurring even in Wycherley’s Country Wife, have the same function. In Shakespeare an isolated character may be the blocking character himself, like Shylock, or a vice who is not merely mischievous but genuinely vicious, like Don John in Much Ado. But he is often someone isolated by his own temperament, like Jaques in As You Like It, or the clown. For the clown is also an actor by profession, and he often sets up a kind of counter-dramatic movement within the play, like the company of Peter Quince in the Dream who put on a play of their own. In The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly, though a clown by temperament rather than by profession, has a role of this sort, the centre of a play within the play from which he watches the main action as a spectator. In Twelfth Night, Feste, the old clown who takes no part in the final marriages, steps out at the end to sing his song of a wistful loneliness in which, ending as it does with the line “We’ll strive to please you every day,” there seems some identification with the playwright himself, the professional actor who has made himself a motley to the view and wonders how many Malvolios in the audience will think him a pitiful barren rascal. The feeling that the clown is a possible focus of pathos is exploited in The Yeomen of the Guard, where there is again a good deal of self-identification, and where the isolation of the figure from the festival conclusion could hardly go much further.
The action of comedy normally moves from what is unnatural or artificial (in the modern sense of something constructed in defiance of nature rather than in accord with it) to what is natural, that is, young men and women getting possession of each other. This is “natural” in the sense of being what we want rather than natural in the sense of being simply there as something we have to come to terms with. The more natural state of things, such as Leontes’ renewed life with Hermione, may include some very unlikely incidents. In Shakespeare’s day “nature” was thought of as existing on two levels. One level was that of the physical world, the world of animals and plants; the other and higher level was that of “human nature” properly speaking. It is natural to man to live, not like animals, but in a social, civilized, and rational state. Thus the action of a Shakespearean comedy, in moving from the unnatural to the humanly natural, passes across a middle area of the physically natural. This is a world often represented by a forest, where the comic resolution is achieved. In human terms it is, again, often symbolized by the fool, who is allowed the privilege of uninhibited speech because he is a “natural,” the possessor of a simplified vision of life withdrawn equally from the world of vicious laws and irrational whims at the beginning of the action and from the happy marriages at the end of it. The fool’s function, like that of the child in Andersen’s fairy tale, is simply to point to the nakedness of the emperor, whether the clothes we think we see are supposed to fit or not.
In Wycherley’s Country Wife we have an ironic comedy based on the two levels of nature just mentioned, but related in a very un-Shakespearean way. Normally the happy ending of comedy is the ending that the audience is pulling for. But nobody can possibly care whether Horner’s little scheme succeeds or not.4 It does succeed, and the conventional comic structure is to that extent preserved. But it is preserved as parody: the action does not move from the unnatural to the natural. The natural, the sense of intelligent and candid social life, is not in the play, except fitfully in Alithea: it is what the audience is assumed to have in its mind as a standard or norm from which to judge the absurdity of the comic action itself. Whenever Restoration dramatists defended their procedures on moral grounds, this was always the line they took: nobody is expected to applaud the comic conclusion, but only the success of presenting a hypocritical and preposterous society throughout. So in Wycherley’s play we look for a focus of sympathy, and find it, so far as we find it at all, in the country wife herself. For Margery is, again, a “natural,” a simple rustic creature trying to take what is grotesquely artificial on its own terms, and throwing its absurdity into high relief by doing so. And although Alithea’s name means “truth,” it is only Margery Pinch-wife who is prepared to tell the truth about Horner at the end, whereupon the entire cast descends on her in a dense black cloud to keep the action in the same state of illusion that it began in.
In comedy the vision of the absurd or preposterous is not only a vision of the unnatural but of illusion, the unrealities that human folly creates for itself. What is natural in terms of desire, the festival conclusion, is a vision of what is, at least comparatively, reality. In such a play as The Country Wife the question of which is which becomes very complicated. There the so-called happy ending, with the hero triumphant over his women, is part of the illusion; reality is in the norm or standard of human behaviour that the audience is assumed to possess. This is one pole of comedy: at the other pole is the kind of interchange of reality and illusion that we have in the Shakespearean romances. There, what reminds us of real life, such as the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso or the jealousy of Leontes, disappears into illusion, and we are led into a new vision of reality through the magical and the incredible. In Wycherley’s play the society on the stage are puppets in a shadow world; the substance of what makes them a society is in the audience outside them. In Shakespeare’s romances the shadow, the statue of Hermione, the “block” of the dead Thaisa, the greed and avarice of Antonio and Sebastian where “no man was his own,” is all that is lost. The substance is regained: Hermione and Thaisa come to life and the Court Party find their “proper selves” through the incredible illusion of the play itself.
In Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme the interchange of reality and illusion is of a different kind. Superficially, what happens is simple enough. Two nice young people want to get married; the girl’s father obstructs this by a perverse whim about wanting to marry into the gentry; he is properly bamboozled, and everything ends happily. But there may be another dimension to the action. Jourdain has no life beyond the play, and as long as the play lasts he remains within his illusion. And Jourdain is not a mere Texas millionaire who thinks his money can buy him anything: if he were, he would be shrewd enough to see through the Shriners’ convention farce of his initiation into the Turkish nobility. Jourdain is a quixotic figure, a genuine romantic, with a tremendous admiration for the aristocracy and for the fantasy world, as it is to him, of art and music and literature and swordsmanship and fine clothes that they surround themselves with. Gradually this fantasy world takes on a “Turkish” form, with no relation to any kind of reality—except, of course, the vision of something wonderfully picturesque which has inspired his obsession in the first place. That remains, and, perhaps, is a more genuine social creation than the actual French aristocracy, of which the only representative actually known to Jourdain is a rather shoddy sponger. The ideal societies created by comedy are seldom more real than Jourdain’s Turkish one, yet some of them stay around in our minds after the progression of leaders and elections and celebrities in the society outside us has come and gone, leaving no rack behind.