‘Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Figaro is planning to marry Susanna, but first he has to win the approval of his employer, the Count Almaviva, who has his eye on Susanna himself, much to the chagrin of his wife the Countess, who is adored by the young Cherubino, who is in turn loved by Barbarina. Just to make things even more straightforward, it also seems that Figaro is already contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina – until it is discovered that she is his long-lost mother.
As soon as we are presented with a situation like this we know we are faced with a type of story unlike any other and one which must be numbered high among the more improbable concoctions of the human imagination. We are entering a world of bizarre conventions, many of them scarcely altered in over 2000 years: the superficial spirit of which was perhaps best summed up by Groucho Marx when, in A Night in Casablanca, he was playing the new manager of a luxury hotel. Summoning his staff, he announces that he is going to change round the numbers on all the rooms. ‘But the guests’ protests one of his employees, ‘they will go into the wrong rooms. Think of the confusion.’ ‘Yeah’ replies Groucho, ‘but think of the fun.’
Confronted by the kind of confusion which prevails at the beginning of The Marriage of Figaro, we may not be entirely surprised if this is made still more complicated by such further familiar sources of misunderstanding as:
• characters donning disguises or swapping identities;
• men dressing up as women, or vice versa;
• secret assignations when the ‘wrong person’ turns up;
• scenes in which characters are hastily concealed in cupboards or behind furniture, only for their presence to be inevitably and embarrassingly discovered.
Indeed we know that the general chaos of misunderstanding is likely only to get worse, until the knot the characters have tied themselves and each other up into seems almost unbearable. But finally, and to universal relief, everyone and everything will get miraculously sorted out, bringing a deliriously happy ending.
In fact Comedy is a very specific kind of story. It is not simply any story which is funny. Some very funny stories have quite different kinds of plot. Indeed, as we shall see, a story may follow the plot of comedy without it being intended to be funny at all. Even the fact that an author describes his story as a ‘comedy’ (e.g., Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard) does not necessarily mean that it is a Comedy in plot terms. But just what it is that shapes the plot of Comedy, that provides the common factor between say, a Marx Brothers film and a play by Shakespeare, an American musical and a novel by Jane Austen, a Mozart opera and a story by P. G. Wodehouse, requires a little careful unravelling. In fact it leads us on to one of the most rewarding puzzles literature has to offer.
Not the least unusual thing about Comedy is that, unlike any other kind of plot, we can actually see it taking shape historically. All the other basic types of story, when we first come across them in the history of storytelling, appear, as it were, fully formed. But when we look back over the history of Comedy we can see it evolving, through three distinct stages. Nevertheless, as we come to grasp the fundamental principle on which the plot rests, we can see that the basic plot itself has not really changed: all that has happened is that aspects of the story originally only implicit have been developed and brought out, to give a sharper focus on what the story is really about.
No one knows for certain whether Comedy began, as legend has it, in the village revels of ancient Greece1 – although there is nothing inconsistent between a spirit of festive revelry and the mood which has prevailed at the conclusion of so many comedies since. What is certain is that, when we first come across specific examples, in the so-called ‘Old Comedy’ which, between 425 and 388 BC, made Aristophanes for nearly 40 years one of the leading playwrights in Athens, we still see the plot at an early stage of its development. We see some of the ingredients which later went to make up the fully-formed Comedy plot, but by no means all.
At the heart of Aristophanic comedy lay an agon or conflict between two characters or groups of characters. One is dominated by some dark, rigid, life-denying obsession. The other represents life, liberation and truth. The issue is ultimately decided, of course, in favour of the latter. In Lysistrata (the most popular of the comedies in recent times because of its ‘feminist, anti-war’ theme), the first group is represented by the men of Athens, full of martial ardour and always away from the city making war; the second by their unhappy wives, stuck at home, determined to cure their menfolk of their warlike obsession. The women hit on the device of retreating to the Acropolis and refusing to have anything to do with their husbands (in particular refusing them their ‘conjugal rights’) until the men agree to give up their love of war. For a time confusion reigns, until the men recognise where their inmost priorities lie and surrender to the women’s demands. There is a final scene of universal reconciliation, as each man is reunited with his ‘other half’, and all go off for a joyous celebration.
In The Wasps Aristophanes shows us the grim figure of Procleon, an old man who is obsessed with serving on juries, passing judgement on his fellow citizens and invariably finding them guilty. His son Anticleon determines to liberate him from this dark obsession. He persuades his father that he could much more conveniently indulge his favourite pastime if they were to set up a courtroom in their own home. The first ‘prisoner’ brought for judgement is a dog accused of stealing a leg of meat from the kitchen. Anticleon contrives so to confuse his father with his conduct of the case that Procleon inadvertently places his juryman’s pebble in the wrong pot, thus for the first time in his life finding a prisoner not guilty. Initially he is furious at having been tricked into betraying his most deeply-cherished principle, but gradually he comes to recognise that his obsession with sitting in judgement was only a terrible imprisonment from which he has now been released. The conclusion of the play shows him happily discovering his new ‘liberated’ self, singing, drinking, going off to parties, pouring scorn on his old jury colleagues who are still stuck on the treadmill of their obsession, and in a final tour de force showing he can dance everyone else off the stage.
In the Thesmophoriazusae (The Poet and the Women) the characters possessed by dark, life-denying ill-humour are the women of Athens who, as they gather for their yearly festival, the Thesmophoria, are plotting to kill the playwright Euripides for the unfair way, as they see it, in which he presents women in his plays. Euripides smuggles his uncle Mnesilochus into the gathering, disguised as a woman, to plead his case. Inevitably his disguise is penetrated, and Mnesilochus is held prisoner while the women angrily decide his fate. He manages to get word of what has happened out to Euripides, who makes various absurd attempts to rescue him, disguised as a succession of heroes from his plays. Only when in desperation Euripides finally plucks up the courage to appear before them in his own identity, and threatens to reveal to their husbands the way they have been carrying on while their menfolk were away at the war, does the light dawn. The women recognise their true behaviour has been such that there is no way they would wish it to be exposed. There is a general return to good humour. Mnesilochus is released and all ends happily.
In each of these stories the eventual happy outcome hinges on a crucial turning point: the moment when the ‘dark’ characters, obsessed with their divisive desire to make war, to judge, to kill, are suddenly forced to recognise something so important about themselves that it completely changes their attitude, paving the way to reconciliation and celebration. It was this which Aristotle called anagnorisis or ‘recognition’, the moment when something previously not recognised or known suddenly becomes clear. ‘Recognition’, as Aristotle put it, ‘means the change from ignorance to knowledge’. Something is discovered which transforms the situation. And although comedy was to go through many changes in the centuries which lay ahead, this transition ‘from ignorance to knowledge’ was to remain at the heart of the comic plot, as the central clue to what this type of story is about.
During the century after the heyday of Aristophanes, Comedy went through a change so marked as to amount almost to a mutation. As the ‘Old Comedy’ gave way to the so-called ‘New Comedy’, particularly associated with the Athenian Menander, and later with his Roman imitators Plautus and Terence, two new elements came to the fore in the plot, so fundamental they have come to be thought of as almost inseparable from Comedy ever since.
The most striking innovation was that Comedy became a love story. The action became centred for the first time on a hero and a heroine: and the chief effect of the confusion or conflict in the story is to keep the two apart until they can be brought triumphantly together in the closing scenes. In other words, the first thing we may observe about the ‘New Comedy’ is simply that it has arrived at the universal happy ending we are already so familiar with from other kinds of story: the final uniting of a hero and a heroine, in a way which symbolises completion, the end of division and the renewal of life.
There are two general ways in the New Comedy in which the lovers may be thus kept apart. In one type of story we see a hero and heroine who passionately desire to get married but are being prevented from doing so by a selfish and unrelenting father, until finally something comes to light which persuades him to withdraw his opposition to the match. In the other kind of story, the central conflict lies in a quarrel between the lovers themselves. This is invariably based on some dreadful misunderstanding (in the New Comedy it is invariably the hero who is guilty of wronging the heroine, by misjudging her in some way), until finally something comes to light which clears the misunderstanding up. The angry hero is contrite, the lovers are reconciled and unity is restored.
Apart from the important addition of the love element (which gives the story a much sharper, more personal focus), the actual shape of the New Comedy thus remains very similar to that of the Old Comedy. The story is still about the resolution of a conflict: some state of darkness and confusion giving way, through ‘recognition’ and a change of heart, to reconciliation and light. In Plautus’s Aurularia (The Pot of Gold), a typical story of two lovers prevented from marrying by an unrelenting father, we are still not far from the world of Aristophanes. Euclio is an obsessive old curmudgeon, reminiscent of Procleon in The Wasps, except that his obsession is with hoarding money rather than judging. His daughter wishes to marry the hero Lyconides, but the old miser is insisting that she marry one of his rich friends, for money. Euclio’s state of darkness becomes even blacker when he loses his most precious possession, a pot of gold. But resolution begins when the gold is found by young Lyconides, who offers it to Euclio in return for permission to marry his daughter. In a change of heart similar to Procleon’s the old miser ‘sees the light’, recognises that his greed has turned him into a monster of selfishness, and not only gives the couple his blessing but the gold as well.
The second, crucially important element which came to the fore in the New Comedy concerned the nature of the ‘recognition’ on which the resolution of the story turns: the nature of what it is that has to be discovered or made clear before a change of heart can pave the way to a happy ending. This centres on the revelation that someone’s identity is different from what it seems.
In the Epitrepontes (The Arbitration) of Menander, who favoured the type of story based on a quarrel between the lovers themselves, we see a young husband and wife, Charisios and Pamphile, who have become violently estranged because, shortly after their wedding, Pamphile had given birth to a child. The baby has somehow been disposed of, but Charisios has been so enraged by this evidence of his wife’s premarital carrying-on that he has left her. The action begins when a mysterious baby turns up, accompanied by various tokens, including a ring. The slaves of the estranged couple get together to discover the child’s identity, and conclude that the baby’s father can only be Charisios himself who, as his own personal slave remembers, gave this particular ring to an unknown girl he had made love to under cover of darkness at a public festival before his marriage. When the slaves confront Charisios with the proof that the baby is his, he is overwhelmed with remorse. He realises that he had dreadfully wronged his wife by berating her for a crime of which he had been just as guilty himself. But the slaves then tell him that, on the evidence of the other tokens, the mother of his child can be no one other than Pamphile: in other words, the girl he had ravished in the darkness was his future wife. The baby whose arrival had caused all the trouble had belonged to them both all the time. With this ‘recognition’, the couple are joyfully reconciled, the slaves are rewarded with their freedom and the play ends in the usual general celebration.
What we see emerging here as a crucial, and from now on increasingly familiar element in Comedy is that one of the chief sources of confusion in the story, and one of the chief obstacles to unity between the characters, is that they are in some way unaware of each other’s true identity, or indeed their own. This had already been embryonically present in Aristophanes (e.g., the disguises adopted by Euripides and his uncle in the Thesmophoriazusae). But it now becomes much more explicit. One of the most important ingredients in the process of ‘recognition’ becomes the establishing of who people really are. Only when everyone’s real identity has been sorted out can the way be made clear to the final union.
There is almost no moment we see more often in comedy than the discovery, to everyone’s astonishment, that the true origins of one of the characters are in fact quite different from what had been generally supposed: usually that he or she is in fact the long-lost child of someone of elevated social position. When this device first appeared in the New Comedy, it was almost invariably the heroine who was belatedly discovered to be of higher social origin than anyone had been aware of, thus dispelling the objections to her union with the hero. In Terence’s Andria (The Woman of Andros), for instance, the hero’s father is violently opposed to his son marrying a poor courtesan, until it is revealed that she is the long-lost daughter of one of his rich friends. The father is of course delighted and at once withdraws his opposition to the match.
So important to the New Comedy was this element of ignorance as to people’s true identity and the need to establish who everyone really is as a prelude to resolution that some plays were concerned with very little else: even the love interest taking second place, or disappearing altogether. Plautus’s Menaechmi, for instance, the play on which Shakespeare was to base his Comedy of Errors, introduces perhaps the ultimate variation on the confusion arising from mistaken identity: the story of two identical twins being repeatedly taken for each other without either being aware of the other’s existence. The hero arrives in a strange town, looking for his long-lost twin brother Sosicles, at just the moment when, after a row with his wife, Sosicles is storming out of his house to take refuge with his mistress. There follows a crescendo of increasingly contentious misunderstanding as the twins are constantly mistaken for each other by everyone else: Sosicles’s wife, mistress, servants and friends. Only when the knot of confusion has reached strangulation point, with Sosicles about to be arrested as a madman, are the brothers finally brought face to face. ‘Recognition’ makes clear all that has happened, and the play ends on the usual note of rejoicing: although noticeably the central point of union is the bringing together of the two long-parted brothers, rather than the reconciliation of Sosicles with his wife.
By the end of the great age of classical stage Comedy in the second century BC, many of the basic features had already been established which were to be the mainstays of Comedy for the next two thousand years. Even the stories themselves were to be revived to entertain audiences of later ages. Molière was to adapt the Aurularia in his L’Avare (The Miser); while the Menaechmi’s direct descendants have included not only Shakespeare’s version, but in the twentieth century a Laurel and Hardy film Our Relations and a successful Broadway musical, The Boys from Syracuse.
Before the Graeco-Roman world came to an end, however, there was a further landmark in the history of Comedy which was to have significance for later ages. This was the moment when, for the first time, the plot moved off the stage to become the inspiration for another kind of storytelling altogether. In the second and third centuries AD there was a vogue for a new kind of prose story. Sometimes described as ‘the first novels’, these were somewhat lurid tales of adventure, centred on a hero and heroine – but their plots followed a formula with a familiar ring. As one authority puts it:
‘the usual pattern is that the hero and heroine fall in love with each other in the opening paragraphs, are separated by a long series of “moving accidents”, and are finally reunited to provide the happy ending.’2
Easily the best-known (and least sensational) of these forerunners of the many novels and romances which in later times were to be based on the Comedy plot is Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. This begins with the discovery by shepherds on a country estate of two babies, each accompanied by tokens. The mere mention of such tokens, a device originally found in mythology and long preceding Comedy, of course signals that the resolution of the story will eventually hang on the discovery of the babies’ true identities. The boy Daphnis and the girl Chloe are each adopted by a shepherd family. They grow up together in pastoral innocence, fall in love and from then on the entire suspense of the story lies in how they can overcome a long series of obstacles to their final union. First, each of the two are abducted in turn by a different set of kidnappers, and manage to escape. Then Chloe’s parents advertise for a rich suitor for her hand, which seems to rule out the impoverished Daphnis – until he is told in a dream where to find the money necessary to win their approval. He does so and halfway through the story it seems as though the couple are about to get married. But then, just as in a Rags to Riches story (there is a strong Rags to Riches flavour about this tale), a ‘central crisis’ intervenes. The son of the rich owner of the estate arrives from the city, and Daphnis’s foster-parents seize this opportunity to produce the tokens found with him as a baby. To the astonishment and delight of everyone except Daphnis and Chloe themselves, it is discovered that Daphnis is the estate owner’s long-lost son. The lovers are heartbroken, because it seems they are about to be torn apart forever. Daphnis cannot now marry a mere shepherd girl. But just before the hero is taken away to the city to begin his grand new life, Chloe’s foster-parents have the bright idea of producing her tokens, which seem to indicate that she may also be of high-born origin. She too joins the party for the city, where the estate owner holds a feast for all the richest men in town. Sure enough, when Chloe’s tokens are handed round, the richest guest of all recognises that she must be his long-lost daughter. Thanks to the discovery of their true identities (a rare instance of both parties turning out to be of nobler birth than had been supposed), all obstacles to the union of the overjoyed couple have at last been removed.
With this delicately symmetrical essay on the importance of discovering who you really are as a precondition to living happily ever after, the classical world more or less bade farewell to the theme of Comedy. The third and final stage in the evolution of the plot was not to unfold for well over a thousand years.
Although the Comedy plot by no means disappeared from Western storytelling during the Middle Ages (whose most famous poem, after all, was explicitly given the name of ‘Comedy’), it was not until the conscious revival of the classical tradition in the pastoral romances and stage comedies of the Renaissance that it swept back to its earlier prominence. When it did so, an extremely important new dimension began to be added to the story which, in a sense, made the plot complete. Nowhere can we see this more clearly illustrated than in the 16 comedies of Shakespeare (nearly half his dramatic output), who did more to explore the full range of the archetypal comic plot than any author before or since.
The first thing which may strike us when we look at the early comedies of Shakespeare after those of the classical world is how much richer and more complex their stories have become: like the textures of Renaissance polyphony after the single-line melodies of plainsong. We can see this particularly vividly in what was probably his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, because we can contrast it directly with Plautus’s Menaechmi, on which it was based. But what a transformation has been wrought in the original simple tale. Whereas Plautus concentrated on just a single thread of misunderstandings, culminating in the one reunion of the long-separated brothers, Shakespeare’s version enriches this with such a tapestry of subsidiary themes and sub-plots that by the end he can present us with a positive cascade of additional unions and reunions. Ephesian Antipholus, the brother whose marital quarrel has lasted throughout the play, is reconciled with his wife. His twin, Syracusan Antipholus, has fallen in love with the wife’s sister: so the play can end on the full resounding note of an impending wedding. Also reunited are the brother’s two servants, another pair of identical twins who had been separated by the same shipwreck which parted their masters. In addition to all this the two Antipholuses are reunited not only with their long-lost father (whose life at the start of the play had been threatened and is now spared) but also with their equally long-lost mother, who makes a dramatic reappearance at the play’s climax. Woven together at the end we thus see no less than seven different, deeply emotional unions or reunions (including that of an entire family), involving a group of people who had all previously been separated or divided from one another. The sense of a kind of cosmic gathering together of those who had been sundered and isolated could hardly be more complete.
It was really in his other early comedies, however, that Shakespeare began to explore that added dimension which was to extend the range of the plot in a way the classical world had not dreamed of.
In classical Comedy, it will be recalled, there had only been one central pair of lovers in a story, and their initial ‘pairing off’ had already taken place before the story opened (or at least, in the later romances, in ‘the opening paragraphs’). We begin, in short, with a pair of already established lovers, and the chief problem of the story is to surmount some obstacle which has arisen – an unrelenting father or a quarrel – to the confirming of their union.
In plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labours Lost, however, we see something very significant happening. We no longer begin with a pair of established lovers. The focus has moved backwards, as it were, to an earlier stage of the process: to the wooing which brings the lovers together in the first place. At the start of the first of these two plays we meet the ill-tempered shrew Katharina who thinks no man good enough for her: and the story tells of how the hero, the imperturbable Petruchio, sets out to break her wilfulness, first to make her accept him as a lover and then to soften and tame her into a dutiful bride. In the second we see no fewer than four handsome young men, who have vowed to have nothing to do with women, being softened into breaking their vow when by chance they run into four attractive young women who, after an initial show of reluctance, finally accept them.
The main action of the story has thus shifted to the pairing off process itself; and in his two remaining early comedies Shakespeare takes this a crucial stage further. At least in The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labour’s Lost we are never in real doubt, once the action has begun, which young man is eventually going to end up with which young woman. But in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (based on an early sixteenth-century Italian romance), a further twist enters the plot. We begin with a pair of seemingly established lovers, Proteus and Julia; while Proteus’s friend Valentine goes off to Milan and falls in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia. But then Proteus himself comes to Milan and also falls in love with Silvia. Thus both young men are now in love with the same young woman. Possessed by his new infatuation, Proteus then becomes a dark figure and proceeds doubly to betray his friend, by revealing to Silvia’s father Valentine’s plan to elope with her. Valentine is banished, leaving Proteus free to continue his wooing of the reluctant Silvia. The situation becomes still more complicated when Proteus’s original love Julia arrives in Milan, disguised as a boy, and becomes his page. Silvia flees to join the man she really loves, Valentine, but is captured by robbers – and rescued by Proteus. Valentine is just about to concede Proteus the right to marry her when Julia speaks up in her true identity, reproaching Proteus for his lack of fidelity. This finally breaks the dark spell which has bewitched Proteus. He ‘comes to himself’, makes up his quarrel with Valentine, and the lovers can at last pair off properly and happily: Proteus with Julia, Valentine with Silvia.
If we have the sense that, in some important respect, Comedy is here at last coming into its own in a form in which we have known it ever since (incidentally giving rise to the most incomprehensible form of literature ever devised, the plot-summary of any play or comic opera based on a ‘love tangle’), this is underlined by the last of Shakespeare’s early comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we see the same kind of tangle handled with the effortless ease which showed him arriving at his full maturity as a storyteller.
When the story opens we meet two young men and two young women in a state of intense misery and confusion. The two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same young woman, Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander and wishes to marry him, but her ‘unrelenting’ father Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius. Her friend Helena, on the other hand, loves Demetrius but is not loved in return. The foursome then enters the mysterious ‘wood near Athens’, where the fairy king Oberon and his mercurial agent Puck get to work sorting things out. But the first result of their enchantments is only to make things worse. By bungling his magic, Puck not only manages to persuade Demetrius to transfer his affections to Helena, but Lysander as well. This leaves Hermia loved by no one, and Helena convinced that all three must be playing a trick on her. Everyone is now at odds with everyone else. All that is required for a happy resolution, however, is for Puck to arrange that Lysander to switch his love back to Hermia. This leaves Demetrius loving Helena, who now accepts that his affection is genuine. The two couples, at last properly paired off, can emerge from the forest to join Duke Theseus and Hippolyta in the joyful prospect of a triple wedding.
What is new about this sort of dizzying merry-go-round is that so much of the story may now be taken up not just with how the lovers can be brought together, but in sorting out the even more basic question of who should end up with whom. In other words, compared with the simple formulae of the classical world, which were solely concerned with the pitfalls which may await lovers after they have established their love, Comedy has now been opened up to include all the possibilities for confusion which may arise before their final pairing off. On the one hand this may simply consist of the uncertainties attending the initial wooing of two lovers, as they first come to terms with their love and learn to accept each other. On the other, it may also include all the vastly greater complications which can arise when love proves inconstant or one-sided, such as when one person’s love for another is initially unrequited; or when a lover begins by loving one person, then switches to another (and not infrequently back again); or when two men are in love with the same woman; or two women with the same man. What has happened, in fact, is that the range of Comedy has been extended, not just by Shakespeare, but in Renaissance literature generally, to include virtually every combination and permutation possible in the human experience of love. Its potential for confusion has, in effect, been made complete. As a result we can begin to see more clearly than ever before the true nature of the Comedy plot.
What we are looking at when confronted by a fully developed Comedy is not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. By the time a jigsaw is complete, it seems obvious that there is only one way it could have ended up, with each piece in its proper place and fitting perfectly together with all the others. But it has not looked so obvious at an earlier stage when all the pieces were still muddled up and separate from each other, and when the significance of the fragment of picture on each piece was still unclear. What has had to be established is the precise nature of each piece: both what it stands for in itself and how it fits together with all the others, as part of a gradually emerging whole. In Comedy, the key to bringing this to light is the process of ‘recognition’. And we can now see how the ‘recognition’ in a fully-developed comedy may involve four inter-related ingredients, all working together.
The first is that any characters who have become dark because they are imprisoned in some hard, divisive, unloving state – anger, greed, jealousy, shrewishness, disloyalty, self-righteousness or whatever – must be softened and liberated by some act of self-recognition and a change of heart. They must in effect become a ‘new’ or different person (‘come to themselves’) and if they do not change in this way, the only alternative, as we shall shortly see, is that they shall at least be shown up and paid out, by punishment or general derision, so they can no longer cause harm to others.
Secondly it may be necessary for the identity of one or more characters to be revealed in a more literal sense. They are discovered to be someone other than had been supposed.
Thirdly, where relevant, the characters must discover who they are meant to pair off with, their true ‘other half’, since until this is established they seem lost and incomplete. Recognition of their ‘other half’ thus becomes an essential part of discovering their own complete identity.
Finally and in general, wherever there is division, separation or loss, it shall be repaired. Families shall be reunited, lost objects found, usurped kingdoms re-established. Whatever is out of place or sick must be restored.
The ‘change from ignorance to knowledge’ thus becomes in each case a transition from division to wholeness, from darkness to light, and we can set out the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of the four ingredients in Comedy like this:
Dark |
Light |
One or more characters are trapped in some dark state which throws its shadow over others. |
They either go through a change of heart or are exposed and punished. |
The identity or true nature of one or more characters is hidden or unclear. |
Their true identities or nature are revealed. |
Lovers are still in a state of uncertainty: e.g., they are separated by a misunderstanding or are still in the process of pairing off. |
Each lover is united with his or her ‘other half’. |
Families are divided and things are ‘not as they should be’. |
Families are reunited and everything is restored to its proper place |
In other words, for love and reconciliation to triumph, it must be discovered who all the characters really are and how they fit harmoniously together. The confusion which precedes this ‘recognition’ can thus be seen as a kind of twilight, marked by the fact that people are insufficiently aware of each other’s and their own true identity: which is why such a conspicuous feature of Comedy is the obscuring of identities, not just through ignorance of birth, but through the whole repertoire of such devices as disguises, impersonations and characters being mistaken for each other.
The one thing of which we can be certain in a Comedy is that the happy ending cannot be reached until everyone has emerged into the full light of day, all disguises are thrown off and the characters no longer seem to be anything other than what they are. In the remainder of Shakespeare’s comedies we see him developing this element in the plot in a particularly revealing way.
A measure of just how richly Shakespeare developed the Comedy plot is to contrast his comedies with those of his contemporary Ben Jonson. Whereas the joy of a Shakespearean Comedy is to show a group of people all being finally lifted up into the light, as the powers of darkness in the story are dispelled, Jonson’s plays derive their humour from concentrating far more obviously just on the devilry of the dark figures. In Volpone, a rich, elderly Venetian conspires with his confederate Mosca to trick a series of gullible fools by pretending that he is on his death bed. Each of the victims is persuaded to think he may be the chosen heir to Volpone’s fortune, and therefore tries to ingratiate himself with the old rogue by giving him a present. Volpone then enjoys discomfiting them by announcing that he has made over all his estate to Mosca instead. But Mosca himself then tries to trick Volpone in turn, by blackmailing him. This so angers Volpone that he foolishly complains to the authorities, with the result that the whole story comes out. The play’s ending simply shows both villains being paid out for their wicked game by being sentenced to fearful punishments.
Volpone is thus scarcely an example of Comedy, as we have been looking at it. The dark figures do not go through any change of heart as a prelude to the resolution. They are merely held up to ignominy and bundled off stage. Equally, there is no sense, as their dark powers are overthrown, of a whole community emerging from the shadows, joining together in joyful celebration round the loving union of a hero and heroine. Almost all Jonson’s characters are shown as self-centred and dark. The focus of the story is entirely on how their greed, vanity, folly and deceit are finally exposed. In The Alchemist Jonson similarly shows a bunch of rogues, led by the cunning and cheeky Face, conspiring to trick various gullible fools into parting with their money, using as their headquarters the house of Face’s master Lovewit during his temporary absence from London. Again the conspirators are eventually caught out, when Lovewit unexpectedly returns; although this time they escape punishment, partly because Lovewit lives up to his name by showing indulgent admiration for his servant’s ingenuity; and partly because Face persuades him to accept one of the victims, the rich widow Pliant, as a wife. At least the play thus ends with a vestige of the conventional happy ending, as Lovewit and Pliant are happily brought together. But this final image of an impending marriage scarcely marks the triumphant resolution of everything the play has been about. It is merely tacked on at the end as a convenient device to round off the story.
Compared with the many-layered complexities of Shakespearean Comedy, the Jonsonian versions, by concentrating on just one aspect of the complete story, are little more than caricatures of the darker side of human nature. The glory of Shakespeare’s comedies is not just that he so joyfully brings out the positive aspect of this plot, but how they may be read as a kind of anthology of almost every variation the plot can offer. He constantly reshuffles the same basic situations and motifs in every conceivable combination, shedding light first on one aspect of the plot, then on another. From the middle of his career, however, we see a remarkably consistent pattern emerging.
In what are often called the ‘Middle Comedies’ – The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night – we are introduced to a group of characters, including a central pair of lovers who meet shortly after the story’s opening. To begin with things go reasonably well, seeming to promise hope for the future. But then a threatening shadow intrudes: and at the heart of the story a particular opposition opens up between two of the characters. At one pole there is the play’s chief dark figure, hard, bitter and vengeful; at the other is the heroine, who spends some crucial part of the story, particularly when the dark powers are most in the ascendant, in disguise: hidden, as it were, from complete view. Thus obscured, the loving heroine becomes the chief touchstone of the story, in one of two ways. Either from behind her disguise, she plays an active and dominant role in bringing about the play’s resolution, in which case she is disguised as a man (Portia as the lawyer Dr Bellario, Rosalind as Ganymede, Viola as Cesario); or she is cast in a more passive role as the story’s chief victim, passing into eclipse like Hero in Much Ado, when she is first taken for dead and then reappears at the end disguised as her cousin. Shakespeare often employed disguises in his earlier comedies, but only once, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, had it been the heroine who adopted a disguise. Now his heroines do it consistently. And only as part of the general resolution and the routing of the dark powers does the heroine reappear in her proper identity: emerging from eclipse to bathe the play’s ending in light.
The dark figure in these Middle Comedies is not one of the central characters but, as it were, an outsider or third party, whose egocentric and vengeful ill-humour throws the lovers into shadow. The supreme example of this is the embittered usurer Shylock; and it is notable that when he is finally put to rout by Portia, Shylock does not go through a change of heart. As is his nature, he remains unrelenting. He cannot therefore be admitted to the general rejoicing at the end, and thus becomes the first example we have seen in Comedy (apart from Jonson’s grotesques in Volpone) of what may be called the ‘unreconciled dark figure’, who ends the story a broken object of derision: a kind of scapegoat or embodiment of all the negative, self-seeking qualities over which the ending of Comedy represents the victory.
In the next play in the sequence, Much Ado About Nothing, a similar part is played by Duke John, the treacherous brother of the lover Claudio. When his villainy is finally exposed he is unrepentant, and while Hero ‘returns from the dead’ to produce the happy ending, John remains off stage as the ‘unreconciled dark figure’, due for punishment.3
In As You Like It the dark figure is Frederick, whose usurpation of his brother’s dominions eventually drives all the light characters into the mysterious, enchanted other-world of the Forest of Arden, He eventually does go through a change of heart, as a result of conversing with ‘an old religious man’, but this takes place off stage (simultaneously with the resolution of the confusion in the forest, as Rosalind throws off her disguise to be reunited with her lover Orlando and her father, the true Duke), and he therefore does not join the closing celebration.
Finally, in the intricate love-tangle of Twelfth Night, the role of dark figure is reserved for Malvolio, although the whole story is so light in tone that he scarcely offers a serious threat to the lovers. His offence is not so much active malevolence as merely the absurd self-love which deceives him into seeing himself as rival to ‘Cesario’ for Olivia’s affections. Even so, Malvolio is still bundled derisively off stage as an unreconciled dark figure. In fact he is virtually the last such figure in Shakespeare’s comedies,4 because from now on we see an extremely significant shift taking place in the way Shakespeare looks at the story.
In All’s Well That Ends Well we still encounter the familiar ingredients of a pair of lovers, with the central opposition between a ‘dark figure’ and a loving heroine who at a crucial moment passes into disguise. But now the dark figure is no longer some third party, like Shylock, but the hero himself. The confrontation between darkness and light has moved right to the heart of the story, dividing the two lovers themselves. The heroine Helen relentlessly pursues the arrogant Bertram through the entire story, with a deep unrequited love. And the hinge of the action, as in Much Ado About Nothing, is a midnight assignation, involving the hero in a confusion of identity between the heroine and another woman. Only this time it is the heroine who is disguised as the other woman, rather than the other way round; and the episode eventually leads to a happy resolution rather than, as in Much Ado, to darkness reaching its blackest point. Obviously where the hero himself is the chief dark figure he cannot remain unreconciled, or the story will not remain a comedy. Sure enough, Bertram’s proud defences finally crumble, and he both accepts and returns Helen’s love.
In his next comedy, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare pursues this theme of ‘the hero as dark figure’ in even more thoroughgoing fashion. Initially his hero Angelo seems the soul of virtue. But step by step he is exposed, behind this righteous persona, as a monster of vengeful hypocrisy; and once again the hinge of the action is a midnight assignation where the hero mistakes one woman in disguise for another. Despite the importance of this episode, however, it is now not so much the heroine who is the chief disguised figure in the play as the wise, all-seeing Duke of Vienna. At the play’s outset he has pretended to go abroad, handing over the governance of Vienna to Angelo. But this has been a deliberate test, to see whether the virtuous young man is all that he seems. In fact the Duke has stayed in the city disguised as a humble friar, to observe and guide from behind the scenes all that follows. It is he who exposes Angelo’s hypocrisy, and eventually confronts him with his guilt: to the point where Angelo is so contrite that he accepts that he must be put to death in punishment. This ‘recognition’ and change of heart allows the Duke to pardon him, paving the way to the happy ending where Angelo and the heroine can be united. And it was this motif which Shakespeare was finally to return to in The Tempest, where again we see the unfolding of the entire drama guided from behind the scenes by an all-seeing ‘wise old man’, the magician Prospero. But before that Shakespeare was to produce his last and most complex exploration of the theme of ‘the hero as dark figure’ and the heroine who passes into eclipse.
The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale are so bleak and death-laden that, as has often been remarked, the story seems to be shaping up into a tragedy rather than a comedy. The hero, King Leontes, conceives a baseless suspicion that his wife Hermione is having an affair with his best friend, King Polixenes. He tries to have Polixenes killed and throws his wife into prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. Becoming more and more possessed by darkness, Leontes orders that the child be taken out and abandoned, and hardens his heart to every indication that his wife is blameless; until eventually his son dies of grief and Hermione seemingly follows suit. At last, thinking his entire family is dead, Leontes comes to himself and recognises the full horror of what he has quite unjustifiably set in train; and at this point, the scene changes in dream-like fashion to ‘the sea coast of Bohemia’. We move at last out of the shadows of Tragedy into the recognisable world of Comedy. Leontes’ little daughter Perdita, ‘the lost one’, has been found by shepherds, like Chloe in Daphnis and Chloe, and has grown up to fall in love with Florizel, the son of Leontes’ old friend King Polixenes. Polixenes, now cast in the familiar role of ‘unrelenting father’, cannot agree to his princely son marrying a mere shepherd girl, and the lovers flee back to the court of Leontes, with angry father in pursuit. Here Perdita’s true identity is discovered. Leontes is overjoyed to be reunited with his long-lost daughter (although this also revives his grief for his lost Hermione). And when Polixenes arrives it does not take long for him to make up his quarrel with Leontes, and for the two fathers to give joyful blessing to the union of their children. Finally Leontes is led to an uncannily lifelike statue of his dead wife. It turns out of course that Hermione had not died in prison but had merely been in hiding, and the statue is herself in disguise. Emerging from her long eclipse, she steps down to embrace her husband. Thus in every conceivable way the story ends happily.
In no other of his comedies has Shakespeare touched so sombrely on death and seeming death as a prelude to regeneration and the eventual victory of love and life. It was the conclusion of a long process of development in which he had steadily deepened his exploration of Comedy, making the issues at stake more and more serious, to the point where they had literally become a matter of life and death. Yet we may note that, at the very moment when Shakespeare reached such near-tragic depths, in a story about a husband separated by a terrible misunderstanding from his wife, he was in fact returning to the very theme which had launched the New Comedy nearly 2000 years before. The plays of Menander, such as the Epitrepontes, centred on precisely this basic situation of a husband and wife, or two lovers, rent apart by some dreadful misunderstanding – with the hero at last coming to recognise that he had done the heroine an appalling wrong. Indeed throughout the New Comedy no general theme had been more persistent than that of the heroine who spends much of the story misunderstood, rejected or otherwise under a shadow. The discovery at the end of so many comedies that this socially humble heroine was in fact the long-lost daughter of a rich man, thus raising her status from that of undervalued outcast to that of a pearl of great price, marked her ‘emergence from eclipse’ just as much as the throwing off of a disguise. There was nothing essentially new about the ‘obscured heroine’. It was just that Shakespeare had found a new and subtle way to express a theme which had lain near the heart of Comedy for 1900 years.
A final very important aspect of Comedy which must now be introduced is again exemplified in The Winter’s Tale. This is the way in which the process of regeneration in the story begins with the coming together of the two young lovers, Perdita and Florizel, in a socially humble setting, in another country, far removed from the darkened and divided world of King Leontes’ court where we began.
If we turn from the comedies of Shakespeare to those of his later seventeenth-century successor Molière, the first thing which may strike us is how uncomplicated their stories are. We are almost back to the simplicities of the New Comedy. We may also be struck by how many of his plays are built round the same basic situation. Firstly, we see a father, the head of a household, who is in the grip of some foolish obsession. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme he is a rich tradesman and would-be social climber who wishes to pass himself off as a gentleman. In Le Malade Imaginaire he is a hypochondriac, with an exaggerated reverence for doctors. In L’Avare, taken straight from Plautus, he is a surly old miser trapped in his obsessive love for his money. In Tartuffe he is under the spell of the hypocritical religious fanatic who gives the play its name.
We then see this deluded paterfamilias cast in the role of selfish and unrelenting father. He has a daughter who is in love with some agreeable young man whom she wishes to marry. But for reasons directly stemming from his obsession, her father is opposed to the match and insisting that she marry some much less desirable person of his own choice: a nobleman, a doctor’s nephew, a rich elderly friend, the appalling Tartuffe himself.
The fundamental situation of the play therefore is that we are presented with an impasse: on the one side stands the unyielding head of the household, in the grip of his dark obsession; on the other, cast under a shadow by his stern refusal to let them marry, are the young couple, representing life, hope and the way forward. The third ingredient is that, in each instance, a key part in breaking up the log jam, allowing the lovers to come together and life to flow again, is played by the paterfamilias’s servants, the young couple themselves and even his wife. In other words a conspiracy is formed against his life-denying rule by all those around him whom he would regard as inferior, junior or subordinate. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme it is the blindly snobbish M. Jourdain’s maidservant and his common-sensical wife who mastermind the ruse whereby the daughter’s lover comes to ask for her hand in the socially dazzling disguise of ‘the Grand Turk’ (thus winning Jourdain’s acceptance before the disguise is thrown off). In Le Malade Imaginaire it is the maidservant who dresses up as another doctor to expose the charlatanry of Purgon, thus helping to free Argan from his obsession and paving the way to the union of the lovers. In L’Avare it is the young valet who, by stealing the old miser’s cash box, finally puts paid to Harpagon’s dark, mean-minded scheme to marry off his two children to rich elderly friends. In Tartuffe it is Elmire, the wronged wife (aided and abetted by maidservant and young lovers) who stages the crucial assignation which exposes to her besotted husband Orgon what a vicious hypocrite Tartuffe really is (and when he is hauled off for punishment at the end Tartuffe represents as complete an instance of the ‘unreconciled dark figure’ as Shylock).
In fact this aspect of Molière’s plays whereby the road to resolution lies through the ‘inferior’ figures in the story was by no means new in Comedy. Again and again, right back to Aristophanes, we see the characters in a comedy separated by, as it were, an unspoken dividing line. The characters above the line, like Moliere’s fathers and their friends, represent the established order, an upper social level, the authority of men over women, fathers over their children. Those below the line, where the shadows fall, include servants, people of inferior class, wives and the rising generation. The chief source of darkness in the story, opposed to life, is on the upper level. The road to liberation lies through the ‘inferior’ level. In The Wasps it was young Anticleon who liberated his grim old father from his obsession with passing judgement. In Lysistrata it was the heroine and her fellow-wives who liberated their men from their ruling obsession with war. In the Epitrepontes it was the slaves to the various parties who, in a kind of below stairs conspiracy, got together to work out the identity of the newly-found baby, thus bringing love and reconciliation back to their master and mistress in the ‘upper world’. Indeed for the slaves to be responsible for sorting out the confusion which had engulfed their social superiors was a regular feature of the New Comedy.
When we come to Shakespeare we almost invariably see a division into an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ world in social terms, and it is even occasionally servants or others on the lower level, as in Much Ado, who expose the vital truth which eventually brings about the triumph of love on the upper level. But much more often as we have seen, the same result is achieved by characters from the social upper level who move onto a shadowy, ‘inferior’ level in a different way, by concealing their true identity beneath a disguise. The essence of Comedy is always that some redeeming truth has to be brought out of the shadows into the light. This often requires a temporary descent into some obscured or ‘inferior’ state in order that the truth may be established, and the retreat behind a disguise is one of the most obvious ways in which this is achieved (e.g., Julia and Viola disguising themselves as pages, Rosalind as a poor country boy, the rich heiress Portia as a comparatively humble lawyer). Another form of ‘descent’ is into some shadowy ‘other world’, just as the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream cannot get themselves sorted out without their descent into the twilit world of the forest and the ‘inferior’ kingdom of the fairies; or the various light characters in As You Like It without their descent into the shadowy world of the Forest of Arden. The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level, or in some other place beyond the consciousness of the ‘upper world’ character or characters who are in the grip of their life-denying state. It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world again, just as happens when Leontes is at his lowest ebb of spiritual exhaustion after the attack of darkness which dominates the first three acts of The Winter’s Tale. The quickening of new life begins far away, amid the socially inferior surroundings where the young lovers are disguised as shepherds, until it eventually sweeps back up to the ‘sick’ King Leontes’ court to turn winter into spring.
We can see a number of variations on this complex but extremely important aspect of Comedy in the memorable constellation of comedies which appeared in various European countries in the 1770s. For instance, in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) we see an upper class young hero Marlow, who has a problem. He cannot relate to women unless they are of a lower station than his own. He is normally ‘one of the most bashful and reserved young fellows in the world’; but confronted with a pretty barmaid he is suddenly seized with amorous confidence. He sets out into the country to meet the girl who has been chosen for him to marry, Miss Hardcastle, but is misled into mistaking her family’s house for an inn. The whole visit thus becomes, in a sense, like a ‘descent into an inferior realm’, with the respectable house itself in effect in inferior disguise. And when the heroine herself enters into the spirit of the misunderstanding, by adopting the guise and manner of a serving girl, the hero is able to make ardent protestations of love to her. It is only at the moments when she reassumes her respectable ‘upper world’ identity that he again becomes tongue-tied. But finally ‘recognition’ takes place; all misunderstandings are cleared up; and the hero has won such confidence in the heroine’s presence during the episodes when she is disguised, that he can at last happily approach her in her true ‘upper world’ identity.
In Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) we see almost the mirror image of this. Here it is the young heroine who romantically cannot imagine herself loving a man unless he is of lowly rank. When the hero, Captain Absolute, falls in love with her, he realises that his income and status are too high for her to reciprocate, so he woos her in the disguise of a poor ensign, with considerable success. But then the hero’s father appears, representing the ‘upper world’, and proposes to the heroine’s guardian-aunt a match between his son and her niece: so that Absolute in his proper identity has to becorne a rival for her affections to himself in his inferior disguise. Eventually, as in She Stoops to Conquer, ‘recognition’ takes place, and the heroine finds that she is now able to love the hero in his true ‘upper world’ identity.
In Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), the road to the happy ending via an inferior level is presented in a different way. We meet two young brothers who are both courting the same girl: one of them, Joseph Surface, apparently the more eligible, in that he is pious and respectable, while the other, Charles, is a reckless spendthrift. Nevertheless it is the outwardly ‘inferior’ of the two, Charles, that the heroine loves: and the brothers are then put to the test. Their rich uncle arrives incognito from abroad and approaches each of them in a different, lowly disguise, as a moneylender and as a poor and needy relative. As so often, the concealment beneath disguise of one character proves an admirable way to catch out and expose the true nature of others. Joseph is revealed as a treacherous hypocrite, while Charles emerges as honest and good-natured. The uncle finally returns to the ‘upper world’ by revealing his true identity, to reward Charles and pave the way to his union with the heroine; while the dastardly Joseph is bundled off-stage as an ‘unreconciled’ dark figure.
But it was in a play written at the same time in France that the theme of the redemption of an ‘upper world’ with the aid of socially inferior characters found perhaps its most celebrated expression: which is how we return to the story with which this chapter began, Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, mostly written by 1778 (though not staged until 1784), and translated into its better known form, with music by Mozart, in 1786.
If one had to choose one story to illustrate almost every point about Comedy which has emerged in this chapter, it might be The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed it is a story almost impossible to summarise briefly, precisely because it weaves so many familiar elements in the plot together. Yet what often passes on the stage as an almost impenetrable thicket of concealments, misunderstandings, stratagems, impersonations and disguises, succeeding each other in bewildering array, and only made acceptable by the continuous flow of some of Mozart’s finest music, turns out to be one of the most perfectly constructed of all comedies, each character and episode interacting on all the others until, finally, everything is in place to turn disastrous confusion into a miraculously happy ending.
The fundamental situation presented by The Marriage of Figaro is one familiar from many earlier comedies, not least those of Molière. We see a household dominated by a ‘dark paterfamilias’, the Count Almaviva, who is blinded by an egocentric obsession: in this case his heartless compulsive philandering. In the shadows cast by his selfishness and ill-temper are his wife, the unhappy Countess, and a pair of young lovers, who are planning to get married, Figaro and Susanna. And if this were a conventional working out of the theme we should expect to see the story ending with the Count, as its chief dark figure, going through a change of heart, thus bringing him back together with his wronged wife and simultaneously paving the way for the union of the young lovers.
But Figaro presents us with a number of twists to the usual formula which lend a peculiar ambiguity to the relationships in the story, giving it unusual psychological force.
For a start there is the ambiguity of the young lovers’ relationship to the couple at the head of the household. In a conventional comedy one of them would have been the child of the Count and Countess. Here they are not related to the Count and Countess at all, and it is implied that they may all be of similar age (although this is ambiguous). This means that, although Figaro and Susanna are servants and socially inferior, they are, in human terms, on much more of a level with the Count and Countess. Secondly, there is the mysterious and shadowy role played in the story by the two lesser couples: on the one hand the elderly Dr Bartolo and Marcellina; on the other the young Cherubino and Barbarina as a second, lesser pair of young lovers. Thirdly, there is the curious way in which the unfolding action emphasises that the ultimate point of the story is not to bring Figaro and Susanna together, which happens some time before the end: but to bring the Count back into repentant and loving union with his Countess. It is the Count whose dark state poses the overwhelming problem of the story, casting a blight over everyone else, throwing his household into chaos. Until that is resolved, not even the union of the lovers can bring a truly happy ending.
When the story opens all seems sunny and normal, as Figaro and Susanna are busily engaged on mundane details of their forthcoming nuptials. But even the fact that they are both preoccupied with different things (he measuring the room for a bed, she dreaming of her hat) is a small subconscious sign that people in this world we have entered are shut off from one another; and gradually we learn that beyond the sunlit foreground a double shadow is looming over the happy pair. First Susanna reveals that the Count has amorous designs on her, which throws Figaro into a jealous rage against the Count. Then Figaro himself confesses that he has recklessly allowed himself to get into the position where, in return for an unpaid debt, he is contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina. In other words, he has passed into a curiously oblique echo of the classic Oedipal situation where a young man finds his way forward to a mature and independent relationship with his feminine ‘other half’ barred by the double obstacle of antagonism to a male rival, representing threatening masculine authority, and an equally retarding tie to a powerful older woman.
But the action of the first act is in fact dominated by another character altogether, the young page Cherubino: and as soon becomes apparent his role in the story is essentially symbolic. With his name resonant of a little boy god of love, Cherubino’s only obvious characteristic is his insatiable, adolescent desire for love. He is like a personification of the restless love-urge, immature, unchannelled, egocentric (and therefore without any content of real love), which is precisely the problem which, in a much darker form, afflicts the Count and is the central problem of the whole story. The point of Cherubino’s prominence in the first act (which afterwards diminishes considerably) is that he rattles about the household like a little inferior shadow of the Count’s own weakness, drawing attention to it: which is precisely why the Count cannot stand him. And the chief effect of the first of the opera’s three episodes of multiple misunderstanding (as characters hide behind the furniture, overhearing what they are not meant to hear) is to bring the Count’s hatred for Cherubino to a head. First the Count learns that Cherubino loves the Countess (which is what the Count himself ought to be doing). Then he thinks, erroneously, that Cherubino also loves Susanna (which is what the Count would like to be doing). We even learn that the Count has designs on Cherubino’s own girl friend, Barbarina. Having worked himself up all round into a jealous fury, the Count tries to put an end to Cherubino’s ‘days of philandering’ altogether by packing him off to be a soldier, little realising that by getting rid of his ‘little shadow’ he will do nothing to solve the real problem of the household which lies in himself.
If the point of the first act is to lay bare in a peculiarly subtle way the hidden source of everyone’s troubles, the second opens with the beginning of an elaborate attempt to do something about it. For the first time we meet the Countess, and see the desperate state of misery to which she has been reduced by the Count’s heartlessness. She is the ultimate helpless victim, consigned to the shadows by the state of darkness which has possessed him. Now with the aid of the much more ‘active’ Susanna and Figaro she is at last beginning to hatch a plot to trap the Count and expose him. This is just the sort of line-up we recognise from Molière: the dark and obsessed head of the household, representing a sick ‘ruling order’, being opposed by an ‘inferior’ alliance between wife, servants and lovers (except that here servants and lovers are the same).
The chief effect of the opera’s second episode of multiple misunderstanding (with characters now hiding in cupboards and jumping out of windows) is, like that of the first, simply to get the Count into a greater state of angry confusion than ever. He is still looking for anyone other than himself to blame for the fact that everything seems to be going wrong. Only now his rage focuses on Figaro. For all sorts of dark and twisted reasons he determines to use his authority to thwart Figaro’s plans to marry Susanna: and he thus passes obliquely into the familiar position of the ‘unrelenting parent’, bent on standing in the way of young love.
Act Three sees Figaro’s problems coming to a head. It seems that there is nothing he can do to prevent the elderly Marcellina claiming her right to marry him – now with the full support of the Count. Confusion and darkness seem about to win their ultimate victory: when suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, it is revealed by way of a birthmark (the equivalent of ‘tokens’) that Figaro is in fact the long-lost son of Marcellina and Dr Bartolo. He has just been on the verge of being drawn into marriage with his own mother. This dramatic revelation of Figaro’s true identity (totally improbable in any sense but that of psychological symbolism) has such a stunning effect on everyone that it completely pulls the rug from under the Count’s feet. We are confronted with that potent image familiar from the end of so many comedies where suddenly everything comes right: a long-separated family is miraculously brought together; long-hidden identities are suddenly brought to light; the young lovers are finally free to get married; and preparations are made for Figaro’s wedding to Susanna at once.
At this point, however, even while the wedding celebrations are in full swing, we are forcibly reminded of how far the story’s title is misleading as to what it is ultimately about. The marriage of Figaro, at the end of Act Three, is by no means the end of the drama. The real problem overshadowing the whole story has yet to be brought to its head, and such is the theme of the fourth and concluding act.
For a third time the chief characters are plunged into a series of multiple misunderstandings, this time at night amid the shadowy surroundings of the garden, as the two leading ladies, the Countess and Susanna, disguised as each other, now take the final initiative in leading the Count a merry dance (so clearly is the focus now on the unshakeable feminine alliance between Susanna and the Countess that they even briefly fool Figaro as well). The Count is led into the final hypocrisy of a jealous attack on Figaro for supposedly making love to the Countess, when in fact Figaro is making love to his own wife and it is the Count who thinks he is making love to Figaro’s. On this climax, bringing the Count’s hypocrisy to its reductio ad absurdum, the doubly-wronged Countess can step from the shadows to bring home to him the full horror of the situation he has got into. We at last see the appalled Count going through the profound transformation we have been waiting for throughout the story. He has at last been forced to confront the truth about himself and his own behaviour. He recognises what a heartless monster of hypocrisy he has become, and pleads with his faithful loving wife for forgiveness. At last everyone in the story can properly pair off, and the four joyful couples sing out the moral of the tale:
‘Let us all learn the lesson, forget and forgive,
Whoever contented and happy would live’
and how, after this tempestuous day (the story’s subtitle is ‘The Day of Madness’), they are going ‘to the sound of music to revel all night’.
The essence of what we see in The Marriage of Figaro is a situation familiar from countless other comedies. We see a group of people, a little community, reduced to complete confusion and misery primarily because one dominant figure in that community is totally egocentric and possessed by a state of ‘darkness’. Because he is not ‘centred’ and right in himself, the repercussions of his inner disorder are felt in a domino-effect throughout the community. The chief source of power in the community is abusing his power. There is no longer a sense of harmonious order. No one quite knows who they are any longer. Everyone is set against everyone else. Nothing is clear.
What has happened by the end of Figaro is a weaving together of all the ingredients which we have seen making up almost any fully developed comedy. The figure who is the dominant source of ‘darkness’ in the story has finally been brought to recognise his blind and heartless egocentricity: he has moved to a different ‘centre’ of his personality or ‘come to himself’. Power and authority in the community is at last being exercised properly and no longer abused. The terrible curse of egotism which has afflicted the community has been lifted. And as part of this same process of healing, of reconciliation and of everything being brought into the light, a number of other things have also happened at much the same time. All disguises have been thrown off. The need for concealment is at an end. Everyone has emerged in or discovered their true identity. All the characters have finally recognised who they must properly pair off with. Everything has at last been brought into a harmonious state of order. Love and friendship are triumphant in all directions. And the story ends on a miraculous image of human wholeness; of everyone brought together, both outwardly and inwardly, in a way which gives us an exhilarating sense of life renewed.
In all these respects we may be struck by the parallels between The Marriage of Figaro and The Winter’s Tale. As two of the most profound of all comedies, it is no accident that each is in the end describing a strikingly similar situation. The ruler of a kingdom or household has fallen under a great sickness of soul which casts all beneath him into shadow, particularly his wife, who becomes the ‘obscured heroine’. Restoration begins in the shadows, ‘below the line’, with the bringing together of a pair of young lovers, representing youth, hope and new life. Eventually the spirit of renewal reaches up above the line, to thaw out the frozen heart of the sick ruler. And in each case the story ends with the ‘obscured heroine’ stepping out of the shadows, emerging from her long eclipse, as the real touchstone of the fact that her husband has at last ‘come to himself’.
An aspect of both these stories very near the heart of Comedy is the dramatic contrast between the role played by the chief masculine and feminine characters. In each story it is a man who is the chief dark figure, abusing his power and spreading disorder and misery in all directions because he is unable to see straight and whole. In each case the other leading male characters – Figaro and Polixenes – also get infected by the confusion and fail to see things straight. It is the feminine characters – Hermione and Perdita, the Countess and Susanna – who remain faithful and unshakeable, standing at the heart of the story for true love and for seeing things straight and whole. And it is not until the men can go through the transformation which softens them and straightens them out, bringing them into harmony with the loving feminine, that the final image of wholeness which rounds off the story can be reached. This is the true significance of ‘the obscured heroine’. So long as the male figures remain egocentric and confused by ‘darkness’, she will remain in the shadows. Whether she is ‘passive’ or ‘active’ (and these feminine pairings, Hermione and Perdita, the Countess and Susanna, each comprise an alliance of both) she is the light at the heart of the story, obscured by the darkness in others. Only when the male characters have eliminated the darkness in themselves can the light represented by the feminine at last shine out to illumine them all.