‘“Princess for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, trying to stop her. “Princess!” She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another’s eyes – and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly became possible, inevitable and very near.’
Nikolai Rostov to Maria Bolkonskaya, War and Peace
More than with any of the other basic plots, it may be tempting to see Comedy as a type of story arrived at by conscious contrivance. Compared with the great primeval shapes of, say, the Quest or the Overcoming the Monster story, with their misty origins in myth and legend, there seems to be something artificial about Comedy. We have already seen how, unlike any of the other basic plots, that of Comedy emerged in historical times and developed to its full extent only in a series of stages. There has certainly been a self-conscious tradition in the writing of comedies for the stage, in a way not true of any other kind of story. The playwrights of the post-Renaissance, such as Shakespeare and Molière, were very much aware they were reviving a form and conventions established by their Graeco-Roman forerunners. And when we consider such familiar situations and devices of Comedy as ‘the unrelenting father’ or the belated revelation of someone’s true identity through tokens or birthmarks, we might be tempted to conclude that later authors were merely writing ‘in a tradition’, consciously drawing on a stockpile of comic conventions bequeathed them by their predecessors.
But to explain the emergence and staying power of the Comedy plot only in this way is to beg two hugely important questions. The first is: why did this particular kind of story establish itself so strongly, over such a long period, as one of the central threads in the literature of Western civilisation? It must have expressed something much deeper than can be accounted for just by the force of convention.
The second question arises when we look at what happened when the Comedy plot, more than ever before, began to move off the stage. How did it eventually come to give rise to stories which seemed to owe little, if anything, to the tradition established by writers for the theatre?
When the first recognisable modern novels began to appear in the eighteenth century, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Comedy should have been one of the plots to which their authors were most obviously drawn. For half a century comedies had been the most prominent type of story on the stages of England and France. One of the pioneers of the novel, Henry Fielding, had written many comedies for the London stage, including translations of Moliere. And in the most successful of his novels, Tom Jones (1749), we see how easily the traditional conventions of stage Comedy could be adapted to the new form.
The theme of the novel is that of a young hero, a ‘foundling’ born in mysterious circumstances, who is searching for his true identity in the world. Throughout the story he is shadowed by the chief dark figure of the tale; his adoptive brother Blifil, who apparently rejoices in every worldly advantage that Tom does not enjoy. In fact the pair are very like Charles and Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal. Blifil seems on the ‘upper world’ surface to be the respectable, well-behaved, successful one of the pair, legitimate and dutiful; while the high-spirited, illegitimate Tom, kind-hearted but constantly misunderstood, seems doomed to poverty and disgrace.
Almost as in a stage Comedy the action of the novel is divided into three main ‘acts’. In the first, set in the countryside of Somerset, we see Tom and Blifil both setting their hearts on marrying the lovely heroine, Sophia Western. Secretly she loves Tom, but the parents on both sides are determined that she should marry Blifil; and the ‘act’ ends with Tom, thanks to Blifil’s unscrupulous machinations, being driven from home to find his own way in the world.
The second ‘act’ shows Tom wandering aimlessly across the countryside and becoming involved in an inn at Upton-on-Severn in that central episode of multiple misunderstanding which is so reminiscent of the conventions of stage Comedy. He meets with a ‘Temptress’ and goes to bed with her. At just that moment, Sophia, who has been pursuing him, arrives to discover what he is up to, which turns her violently against him. Then her father also arrives and imagines Tom must be in bed with Sophia. This creates the greatest possible degree of misunderstanding all round, and the chief consequence of this ‘act’ is to set the hero and heroine at odds, thanks to Tom’s moment of weakness: which means he is going to have to do a great deal more to prove himself truly worthy of her before any happy ending can be reached.
In the third and final ‘act’ all the main characters converge separately on London, where the denouement will eventually take place. We begin with Tom living in obscure, ‘inferior’ circumstances and, through various acts of kindness and courage, working his way back to the position where he can once again plausibly confront Sophia and seek a reconciliation. But just as this seems on the cards, he is caught out in a second act of weakness with a ‘Temptress’, the imperious and treacherous Lady Bellaston (whom he first woos at a masked ball imagining that she is Sophia in disguise). This lands him in what seems like a fatal catastrophe. Thanks to Lady Bellaston’s scheming, he ends up in prison. Here he is told that the first ‘Temptress’ he made love to at Upton was in fact his own mother. He seems doomed to remain in the inferior underworld forever. Meanwhile, in the ‘upper world’, arrangements are being made for Sophia’s marriage to Blifil. Then comes the dizzying series of revelations which comprise the ‘recognition’. Tom discovers his true identity, as Blifil’s elder brother. Blifil’s real nature as an unscrupulous villain and hypocrite is finally exposed. Sophia recognises Tom’s true worth and that, for all his moments of weakness, he has never ceased to love her. Their wedding is arranged, to universal rejoicing, while Blifil, as ‘unreconciled dark figure’, meets his come-uppance off stage.
Quite apart from Coleridge’s oft-quoted claim that Fielding’s novel had one of ‘the three most perfect plots ever planned’ (along with Jonson’s The Alchemist and Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus), it is worth summarising Tom Jones in this way because it shows how little new there was to the treatment of Comedy when it moved off the stage into the pages of the novel. We see all the familiar devices: characters in disguise; ‘unrelenting parents’; assignations where the heroine is confused with another woman; the discovery of someone’s true identity as a crucial part of the ‘recognition’. We see an unusually thorough working out of the contrast between an ‘upper world’ based on false values and the ‘inferior’ world where true worth is preparing for the moment when it can finally be revealed and brought up into the light: except that here it is the hero rather than the heroine who spends most of the story ‘obscured’, and Tom also has to work hard to prove his worth. Unlike the conventional ‘wronged heroine’ he is by no means wholly innocent.
We also see in Tom Jones how the novel was able to present the events leading up to this final emergence into the light as a more gradual process, taking place over a long period of time, corresponding more nearly to the processes of growth and development in human life. Fifty years later came another major step in the evolution of Comedy into a plot for the novel. Here, in an episode almost unique in the history of Comedy, we are given a rare glimpse of this plot – for all its overtones of artifice – springing directly from the circumstances of ‘real life’, showing how closely it could express the inmost patterns of an author’s own psychology.
In the 1790s a young girl in her late ’teens began writing novels in a Hampshire rectory. The sixth of seven children, most of whom were already married, Jane Austen had reached an age where her thoughts about the future were dominated by the possibility of her own marriage, and one of the most striking things about her novels is the way they reflected her personal situation. Quite apart from the fact that, as a woman, she centred her versions of the plot on a heroine rather than a hero, critics have noted how deeply she projected aspects of her own personality into her heroines. And at the very time when she was preoccupied with speculation as to how her own life might unfold, through a fog of uncertainty, to that central goal of finding her right ‘other half’, she was drawn to the plot which most naturally expresses this pattern.
Qualifying the impression of a plaster saint long fostered by her family after her early death (loved, as it was put on her tombstone, for ‘the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper’), Jane Austen could be an ironical, often prickly and outspoken lady, with a tart tongue and shrewd eye for the pretensions and shortcomings of others. In her first completed novel, Pride and Prejudice, we see many of these characteristics, not least in her ‘active’, strong-minded heroine Elizabeth Bennett; and the essence of the story is the long gradual transformation which allows Elizabeth to come to terms with the rich, nobly-born hero Darcy, perhaps the most romantically conceived of all the versions of the ideal man she herself might have hoped to marry. At first Elizabeth considers Darcy to be insufferably proud and remote. But then her own pride is humbled by her folly in being taken in by the weak, unscrupulous Wickham. Step by step she softens towards Darcy, and we see him gradually proving himself in her eyes, as he shows himself beneath his aloof exterior to be both manly and generous-hearted: until finally both can ‘recognise’ and reveal their love.
What we see here is a story completely shaped by the underlying form of Comedy, but in a new kind of treatment where the conventions about misunderstandings, disguises, failure to recognise identity and ‘dark’ figures getting caught out are no longer presented in the terms of the old stage devices, but rather more subtly, in terms of the gradual revelation of people’s true character from behind first mistaken impressions, and the discovery of true feelings, in a way which corresponds more to our experience of life.
In the other two of Jane Austen’s early trilogy of mature novels, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, we again see two heroines working their way through all sorts of misunderstandings and love-tangles towards eventual happy union with the hero. In the first, Elinor Dashwood represents another aspect of Jane Austen as the patient, high-principled young woman who quietly watches and waits while almost everyone else around her behaves foolishly or badly, until finally the erring hero can be freed from the little ‘Temptress’ who had him in her clutches and returns contritely to the admirable and constant Elinor. In the second we see the heroine Catherine Morland as herself a rather foolish girl who has to learn her lesson before she can be united with the admirable and constant hero Henry Tilney; and here it has been plausibly suggested that there is more of Jane Austen in the shrewd, ironical Tilney than in the heroine.
By the time her first three novels had been completed but not yet published, Jane Austen had been through the greatest disappointment of her life, when her one true love, James Lefroy, a penniless would-be lawyer, had been torn away from her by his family, on the grounds that, as an equally penniless clergyman’s daughter, she would not be a suitable match. She then suffered a further devastating blow when her father retired, handing over the rectory which had been her home and workplace to her brother. Forced to move with her parents to lodgings in Bath, she felt so dislocated that she broke off from writing for a decade. But when she was finally able to settle down in a Hampshire cottage with her sister Cassandra, she embarked on the intensive burst of writing which between 1811 and 1816 produced three more novels, now reflecting the fact that she was no longer a young girl with every expectation of marriage but a spinster on the way to middle-age, who had seen her hopes of marriage dashed. Partly this was through the inadequacy of the men she had met; partly because of her own intimidating intelligence and sharp eye for other people’s faults.
All three novels are still shaped perfectly round the Comedy theme, showing a heroine who against all odds finally achieves the happy ending of marriage, and again we see the same contrasted aspects of Jane’s own personality projected into their three, very different central characters. Fanny Price, the poor little heroine introduced into the household of her rich cousins in Mansfield Park, is like a rerun of Elinor Dashwood, as the unshakeably moral young woman who watches while all the other young men and women around her behave foolishly and progressively get caught out; until finally the contrite hero Edmund comes to recognise what a rock of good sense and true feeling she had been, the only one who saw the world straight and did not betray herself.
The second of the three, Emma, is perhaps the most remarkable of all Jane Austen’s variations on the Comedy plot, not least because, as in The Taming of the Shrew, we see the rare spectacle of the heroine as the chief ‘dark’ figure of the story. Emma Woodhouse, the only child of a weak, valetudinarian father, is a bossy, wilful girl of powerful personality, prone both to be severely critical of other people’s weaknesses and to try to organise their lives. In this sense, as an ‘active’ heroine, she is like a darker, more interfering, more self-destructive version of Elizabeth Bennett. Only one person, Mr Knightley, has the strength of character to stand up to Emma and the shrewdness of heart to recognise that beneath her capacity for bossy self-deception there is a potentially sensitive, feminine and lovable girl being stifled by her domineering outward persona. The ‘recognition’ takes place when, as Emma is finally caught out in her match-making on behalf of Harriet, by trying to bring her young protégée together with Mr Knightley, she ‘comes to herself’ in realising what a fool she has been, and that it is really she herself who loves Mr Knightley. In her foolish persona she had completely overlooked the fact that he was her proper ‘other half’. But equally, if she had not discovered her other, softer, repressed identity, he would never have accepted her. Her true inner feminine self has to be rescued from the shadows into which it has been repressed by her hard, superior persona, before the two of them can be brought together.
If Jane Austen was perhaps unconsciously reflecting here one reason why her own personality had made it difficult for her to find the right Mr Knightley, in her last completed novel Persuasion she expressed her melancholy in a more obvious way. Here we again see the constant heroine who quietly observes the antics of others, only this time Anne Elliott feels she is getting too old to hope for marriage: half-resigned to spinsterhood, half looking back with regret to her one real missed chance, when she had foolishly turned down Captain Wentworth at the urging of her tyrannical aunt, playing the role of ‘unrelenting parent’. Then, almost unbelievably, Captain Wentworth turns up again, still looking for a wife; but Anne now has to watch him wooing others, much younger, more foolish and unsuitable than herself. The tangle becomes still worse when Anne herself is wooed by a man whom she might almost accept, to console her for her disappointment; until he reveals his true nature as a weak, treacherous trifler with ladies’ affections (a recurring figure in Austen’s novels, the ultimate ‘dark’ opposite to her admirable, strong and constant ‘light’ heroes and heroines). At last both hero and heroine are free to ‘recognise’ what has been subconsciously growing in each of them for a long time: that they still love each other and that nothing can any longer keep them apart. And so, for the last time in her stories (she was already sickening while she was writing Persuasion and died the following year), Jane Austen was able to imagine arriving at the happy ending which was always to elude her in life.
By the mid-nineteenth century the Comedy plot had become so well established in its new incarnation that it crops up in novels all over the place (although Balzac’s novel-sequence La Comedie Humaine is largely shaped by other plots). In many instances the familiar conventions of stage Comedy continued to appear, such as the last-minute discovery of someone’s true identity as part of the ‘recognition’ (e.g., Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Trollope’s Doctor Thorne). But in some of the most familiar examples Comedy had by now travelled so far from its theatrical origins and become so successfully disguised in its new role that we might not even notice that the same archetypal plot is shaping the story.
We shall look briefly at two of these ‘disguised Comedies’, among the best-known novels of the age. The first is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), which of course was written by a woman and centres on a heroine. The opening episodes of this long novel show the high-minded young Dorothea Brooke being drawn into marriage. But it is immediately clear that this is no prelude to a happy ending. Her husband, Dr Casaubon, is a dry-as-dust old clergyman and amateur scholar, old enough to be her father, and this ‘father-daughter’ balance turns out to be the key to the real nature of their unhappy relationship. Even before the marriage Dorothea has already met Casaubon’s nephew, the handsome young artist Will Ladislaw, and this establishes the contrast between the tedious old pedant, representing death, and the romantic young painter, representing life. Dorothea’s marriage is soon seen to be an empty imprisoning sham, as it becomes clear that the petty, pompous, jealous Casaubon, obsessed with his never-to-be-written book on myths, is an empty and self-important fraud. But eventually he dies, leaving a will which lays down that Dorothea can only inherit his considerable estate so long as she does not marry Ladislaw. Up to this point, the possibility of such a thing has not entered their heads, but now it begins to prey on each of them separately: although of course it cannot be, because of Casaubon’s prohibition. Dorothea’s dead husband thus, in effect, assumes from the grave the role of ‘unrelenting father’, standing in the way of the young lovers getting together. Other familiar elements of the Comedy plot appear: Ladislaw discovers the long-concealed truth of his parentage; Dorothea sees him holding hands with another woman and is miserably jealous, wrongly imagining they are having an affair. Finally ‘recognition’ comes when Dorothea realises that her love for Ladislaw transcends everything. The lovers confront each other, declare their love and walk liberated together into the future.
Cast on a much grander scale, another novel of the period shaped by the Comedy plot was Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1868). Among all the dozens of characters we meet in the opening chapters are four young people, all on the verge of embarking on the wider stage of the world. First there is the huge, awkward, introverted Pierre. Then, in the Rostov family, there are young Nikolai, extrovert-edly looking forward to his career in the army, and his lively younger sister Natasha, Finally there is the shy, spiritual Maria, living at home in the country wtth her old father, the retired general Prince Bolkonsky. These are the main heroes and heroines of the story; although we must also include Maria’s brother, the rather older Prince Andrew, already married and out on the stage of the world as a fast-rising young officer.
There is no doubt who occupies the role of chief dark figure in the story. The self-created Emperor Napoleon looms up like a distant cloud on the horizon in the opening line of the book. His insatiable ambition casts an ever-growing shadow over everyone, first coming to a head in the great confrontation between the Russians and the French in Austria in 1805 (although this is still at a reasonably comfortable distance from Russia itself); but finally, with the invasion of 1812, bursting right into the heart of Russia and the lives of all the main characters.
Across all this vast canvas and tumult of great events, what binds the whole narrative together is the working out of the destinies of the central four figures, with Prince Andrew, through every kind of misunderstanding, uncertainty and switch of love. We follow Pierre through the death of his father, his disastrous marriage to the temptress Helene Kuragin, his long and painful inner journey to discover ‘the meaning of life’. We follow Nikolai through his adolescent love for little Sonia, and his character-forming adventures as an army officer. We see little Natasha blossoming into an adult, ‘active’ heroine, falling in love with Prince Andrew after the death of his wife, getting engaged to him and then falling into the disastrous folly of her infatuation with the unscrupulous fortune-hunter Anatole Kuragin. We have earlier seen the Princess Maria rejecting a cynical offer of marriage from the same dark figure, before sinking into a long ‘passive’ eclipse under the shadow of her tyrannical old father, imagining she will always remain a spinster.
Then comes Borodino and Napoleon’s occupation of burning Moscow, the moment when darkness seems complete and all the characters are hurled about, willy-nilly, in the book’s climactic episode of confusion. Pierre, who has already begun to sense a growing love for Natasha, is plunged into an ‘inferior realm’, firstly through his wandering about occupied Moscow in humble disguise, then through his hardships on the long march westward as a prisoner of war, daily expecting death, although it is in these depths that he meets the old peasant Platon whose wisdom transforms his life. Nikolai, in the chaos of the retreat to Moscow, meets and gives assistance to Princess Maria, before plunging into the further chaos of the ensuing battles. Natasha, in the chaos of the Rostovs’ flight from Moscow, is reconciled with the dying Prince Andrew; and then begins to realise that she loves Pierre. Princess Maria, after her eventful meeting with Nikolai, begins to emerge from the shadow of her tyrannical old father, and realises that she loves Nikolai.
Finally the much greater shadow which has fallen over all of them begins to lift, when Napoleon orders the retreat from Moscow. With gathering pace, the chief dark figure of the story, with his battered legions, is bundled towards ignominious expulsion from the stage. As the light returns to Russia, the book moves towards a conclusion which, through most of its course, would have seemed totally improbable. Pierre and Natasha are reunited, declare their love and marry. Nikolai and Maria meet again, discover their love for each other, and also marry. Two unlikely couples have been brought together in a way which could not have happened without the vicissitudes and painful self-discoveries forced on them by the chaos, the suffering and uprooting of the war. And in their two joyful unions we see a microcosm of the greater fate of Russia itself, having come through the colossal crisis which had enabled her people to discover their inmost sense of national identity and now emerging into peace with a triumphant sense of life renewed.
But of course War and Peace does not end there. In Tolstoy’s Epilogue we are carried forward a few years to be given a glimpse of the family life of the two couples after their marriage. Earlier authors of novels based on the Comedy plot, such as Fielding and Jane Austen, were able to remain within the archetypal framework and to end their stories quite happily on the great symbolic image of the wedding. But Tolstoy was so preoccupied with the ‘realistic’ and historical element in his story that he could not resist wanting to see what happened next, how the story continued after the archetypal ending; with the result that, as he explored the strains and disagreements which would inevitably be part of that aftermath, he was in danger of dissipating the impact of that final image of unity and life renewed, by allowing his story to peter out on an unresolved image of new disunity and uncertainty.1
This was merely one instance of the problems which were beginning to surround the Comedy plot in the mid-nineteenth century as it moved away from its original forms of expression. It was not that the plot was changing its structure; simply that it was being put to purposes which were threatening to detach it from its original archetypal foundations. And this was leading to a new phase in the history of the plot which has, in the past century or so, drastically altered its role in Western storytelling.
Ever since its beginnings one of the most remarkable things about Comedy was the way it had preserved a balance between the superficially light-hearted presentation of apparently quite implausible events and a core of fundamental seriousness. Part of the miracle of the comedies of Aristophanes or Shakespeare or Mozart is that, while constantly provoking their audiences to laughter, they manage to explore some of the deepest issues of human life. But in the nineteenth century, as Comedy moves into new forms of expression, there are signs that this balance is being lost. Tolstoy would never have thought of War and Peace as a ‘comedy’, even though unconsciously he was drawing on the archetypal outlines of the ancient plot, because he was emphasising its serious, ‘realistic’ element to create one of the greatest and most profound novels ever written. And shortly we shall look at what was happening in the other direction, as Comedy began to be used in forms which preserved the lightheartedness while losing its core of seriousness, a tendency which first showed itself on the stage.
On the stage, in fact, Comedy had by the mid-nineteenth century fallen into relative eclipse since its prominence in the previous century. In 1868 (as it happens, the year Tolstoy began publishing War and Peace), it made a conspicuous reappearance in a form which seemed to owe little to the tradition of the earlier operatic comedy of Mozart and Rossini. Wagner’s Die Meistersinger is a unique opera. It is unmistakably shaped by the plot and conventions of Comedy (even to the extent of having a comic ‘midnight assignation scene’ where another woman impersonates the heroine), But it was intended by its composer as a fundamentally very serious work. And we shall consider it briefly in conjunction with another unusual opera, Richard Strauss and Hugo van Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911), which even more obviously managed to preserve the balance between light-hearted exterior and serious core; although it was self-consciously placed in an eighteenth-century ‘Mozartian’ setting as if to recognise that by the time it was written in the early-twentieth century it was no longer possible to keep the traditional balance except in terms of pastiche.
Essentially, the two operas have much in common. Each is centred on four figures: a young hero and a young heroine; a boorish, insensitive dark figure who is a rival for the heroine’s hand; and an older figure who selflessly masterminds from behind the scenes the hero’s ultimately successful wooing of the heroine.
In Die Meistersinger the heroine Eva is established as the supreme prize for any man to win when her father, a prominent local citizen, announces that whoever wins the great song contest held by the Mastersingers of Nuremburg may be given her hand in marriage, There are three possible competitors: the chief dark figure Beckmesser, a leading Mastersinger who is obsessed with the Guild’s traditional rules of song composition; the hero, Walther von Stolzing, an unknown newcomer to the city who sees Eva in the opening scene, falls in love with her and is determined to win her; and a mysterious older figure, also a veteran Mastersinger, the wise, fatherly Hans Sachs. Initially the hero seems doomed because his first effort at a song breaks all the complicated rules laid down for songwriting by the Guild of Mastersingers, and he is grimly ruled out of order by Beckmesser. Only Sachs perceives that Walther’s song in praise of love, spring and new life is in fact of exceptional beauty. The Mastersingers’ rejection of Walther thus shows them to be an ‘upper world’ based on false values and limited awareness, while the hero, in the ‘inferior realm’, represents the life and truth which they (particularly Beckmesser) completely lack. As the action prcceeds, Beckmesser is more and more revealed as absurd, egocentric and anti-life. Eva dreads the possibility that he might win the contest and therefore her hand in marriage; and would like to hang on to her ‘father-figure’ Hans Sachs, But he tells her that he is too old for her, and that she must have faith and courage to move forward, to embrace the prospect of new life. Eventually the two chief competitors come before all the inhabitants of the city for the final test, Both are in fact intending to attempt the same song, because Beckmesser has stolen a copy of the song written by Walther, imagining that it is the work of the old master Sachs. Beckmesser makes a complete hash of it, because he is not in touch with life, and is laughed off the stage as an ‘unreconciled dark figure’ almost as memorable as Shylock. Walther triumphantly wins the contest and Eva’s hand, and the opera ends with a universal hymn of praise to the wise Sachs who has guided the story to its happy conclusion.
In Der Rosenkavalier the part of the older figure is played by the Marschallin, an imposing lady portrayed as in early middle age (although she is in fact only 32), who has a young lover Octavian. The Beckmesser role is played by her boorish and lecherous cousin, Baron Ochs, who tells her he is hoping to marry a lovely young heiress Sophie. Can the Marschallin recommend a suitable young man to carry the traditional ‘silver rose’ to his fiancee, to demonstrate his intentions? The action of the story shows how the older woman selflessly sends her young Octavian to woo Sophie, nominally on behalf of Ochs, but with the predictable result that hero and heroine fall in love. Sophie’s father, a nouveau riche who wishes his daughter to marry into the nobility, plays the traditional role of ‘unrelenting father’ in trying to force her into marriage with a man she detests; but the Marschallin masterminds the final routing of Ochs when he is lured into a midnight assignation with a young girl Mariandl, who turns out to be the hero in disguise. The foolish Baron is exposed and laughed off the stage as ‘unreconciled dark figure’. With the Marschallin’s blessing (albeit tinged with melancholy for the passing of her own youth), Octavian and Sophie are joyfully united.
Both these stories bring out with unusual subtlety a theme which had lain near the heart of Comedy ever since it first became centred on a pair of young lovers, as indeed it lies at the heart of so many other types of story: the handing on of the torch of life to a new generation. We see a ruling order which has become corrupt and out of touch with life, so often represented by the ‘unrelenting parent’ and here by Beckmesser and by the decadent aristocrat Ochs. We then see appearing in its shadow the seeds of new life, in the burgeoning love of the young hero and heroine; until eventually one or both are raised up from the shadows of the ‘inferior realm’, so that the story can end with them at last united centre stage. The transition to a new, healthy order, holding out hope for the future, is complete.
But if this is one of the most serious themes near the heart of Comedy, in the forty years between Die Meistersinger and Der Rosenkavalier the Comedy plot had swept into a new age of popularity on the European musical stage, in a form where the serious element in the story had been all but lost sight of. In Offenbach’s Paris, Strauss’s Vienna, Gilbert and Sullivan’s London, this was the heyday of ‘comic opera’ or operetta. And here we suddenly see all the familiar ingredients of the plot being played with, in a way which seems simply like a burlesque of the traditional form.
Stories such as those of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1874) and The Gypsy Baron (1885) are perfectly shaped by the pattern of the Comedy plot, and crowded with every sort of traditional device: disguises, assignations where the heroine is confused with another woman, startling revelations of true identity (including in The Gypsy Baron the discovery that the gypsy heroine is in fact a princess, in Die Fledermaus that a mysterious Hungarian princess is in fact the heroine), and so forth. But in a way not true of Comedy before, there is never any intention that we should look for a serious message in the story. It is as if the medium of the Comedy plot, with all its familiar conventions, has itself become the only message.
These conventions were even more obviously caricatured in the contemporary British equivalents of Viennese operetta, the ‘comic operas’ of Gilbert and Sullivan. In The Pirates of Penzance (1880), for instance, the entire female chorus, the daughters of a major-general, fall in love with the male chorus, a gang of pirates. The major-general not unnaturally assumes the role of ‘unrelenting father’, pleading that he is an orphan and cannot let his daughters go, since they are the only joy left to him; but the pirates eventually emerge in their true identity as noblemen in ‘inferior disguise’, so the old soldier is only too happy to relent. In HMS Pinafore (1878) the hero, a humble seaman, falls in love with his captain’s daughter, the heroine, who is also being wooed by the pompous, self-important Sir Joseph, ‘ruler of the Queen’s navee’. Eventually it is revealed that the hero and the captain had been switched as babies, so, highly improbably, they are now switched back again. The hero becomes a captain and the captain a humble seaman. Obviously the First Lord of the Admiralty cannot marry a mere seaman’s daughter, so hero and heroine can at last be united.
This burlesquing of the Comedy plot was carried over to the non-musical stage in plays such as those of Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) shows us two heroes, Jack and Algernon, a pair of rich and single upper-class young men. Jack, who when he is in London for some reason unexplained calls himself Ernest, wishes to marry the beautiful Gwendolen. But there is a formidable obstacle in their way in the shape of her fearsome mother Lady Bracknell who, as ‘unrelenting parent’, is refusing to allow the match. Algernon then discovers that his friend Jack is acting as guardian to a pretty little ward, Cecily, who lives quietly in the country, and at once hurries down to make her acquaintance, passing himself off as Jack’s fictitious brother ‘Ernest’. The predictable result is that both young couples are soon hopelessly in love (although, typically implausibly, the two heroines each wish to marry their man only because they are under the false impression that he is called Ernest). Lady Bracknell is forbidding Gwendolen to marry Jack, because he does not know who his parents were (he had been found as a baby abandoned in a handbag). Jack, in revenge, therefore assumes the role of ‘unrelenting parent’ in turn, by forbidding his ward’s proposed marriage to Algernon. This double impasse is finally resolved thanks to the arrival of Cecily’s governess Miss Prism, who inadvertently reveals Jack’s true identity. He is in fact Algernon’s elder brother, who had been lost as a baby when Miss Prism, as his nanny, had confused him with the manuscript of a three-volume novel and left him in the parcels office of a mainline London railway station. His true name, it then emerges from a reference book, has been Ernest all along. In this not even symbolically plausible fashion, all obstacles in the way of the two couples being united have been removed (except that Cecily never explains why she is prepared to overlook her previous insistence that she could only marry a man called Ernest).
If the core of seriousness had already begun to drop out of Comedy, what happened in the twentieth century – when the plot continued to enjoy enormous popularity in many different forms – was that Comedy tended to develop almost into two different types of story. On one hand were those expressions of the plot where the love interest took precedence, often without particular humour. On the other were those which concentrated on the humour, or as we say the ‘comic’ element, with the love interest either relegated to a subordinate place, or eliminated altogether.
Stories of the first kind, where the love interest predominates, became particularly popular in that home of sentimentality, Hollywood. An early example, featuring the leading hearthrob of the silent screen Rudolph Valentino, was The Sheikh (1921), based on a novel published in England two years earlier by Edith Hull, the wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer. The English heroine is shown falling into an ‘inferior realm’ when she visits an Arab festival in disguise and is captured by an Arab sheikh (played by Valentino). She secretly begins to fall in love with her captor, but is then captured by a genuinely ‘dark’ figure, a villainous bandit chief. She is rescued by her gallant sheikh and all is resolved when he turns out to be really a European nobleman in disguise, adopted by Arabs when his parents had been killed in the desert. His true identity revealed, showing him not be racially ‘inferior’ after all, the loving couple can happily return to the ‘upper world’ of Europe to be married.
The love aspect of Comedy also came to the fore in that twentieth-century successor to the tradition of ‘light opera’, the American stage and film musical. Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1949), for instance, was an almost entirely straight and sentimental love story. The heroine, an American naval nurse, arrives during the Second World War on a Pacific island, where she falls in love with a French planter. But he has had two children by a Polynesian woman, now dead; and because of this supposedly ‘inferior’ racial link, the heroine is reluctant to marry him. But thanks to his intimate knowledge of the islands, the planter is now recruited by the US Army to play a key part in a military operation. When he is smuggled onto a Japanese-occupied island to spy on enemy military movements, he is revealed to be a brave hero. The heroine at last sees him in his true light as a real man, no longer ‘inferior’, and the story ends with her assuming the role of mother to his half-Polynesian children as the couple look forward to their marriage.2
We see a rather more obviously burlesqued version of the contrast between a ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ world in Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1953), set in the underworld of New York’s gambling fraternity. Nathan Detroit is desperate for money to rent a venue for an illegal crap game, because several big gamblers are in town, including the hero, Sky Masterson. Masterson casually boasts that there is not a woman in New York he could not persuade to accompany him to Havana, known in those pre-Castro days as the morally unconstrained ‘fun city’ where New Yorkers could let their hair down. Detroit makes this boast the basis of a wager. He points to the most unlikely woman he can imagine, Sister Sarah, the pretty but prim young organiser of the local Save-A-Soul Mission (in relative terms, therefore, since she is so moral and straitlaced, an ‘above the line’ character). Masterson propositions her, promising to produce ‘twelve genuine sinners’ at her next meeting if she will come to Havana with him, but she merely slaps his face in disgust.
Then, however, the fearsomely dragonish General Cartwright arrives from headquarters, threatening to close down the mission unless Sarah’s next meeting is packed with repentant sinners. The heroine therefore accepts Masterson’s bargain and agrees to accompany him to the ‘inferior realm’ of Havana, where she gets drunk in a nightclub and confesses that she loves him. She returns to New York and her straitlaced ‘above the line’ persona, appalled at her fall from grace. But Masterson keeps his side of the bargain. Her next meeting is packed with seemingly ‘repentant’ gamblers, General Cartwright is impressed and the mission is saved. But the heroine now learns to her horror that Masterson had only taken her to Havana for a wager. As the story moves to its climax, however, she then further discovers he has been telling everyone that he had lost his bet, and had not been able to persuade her to accompany him to Havana after all. She is so touched by his concern for her reputation that she rushes out to apologise for having misjudged him. They recognise their love for each other and the story ends, happily if implausibly, with their wedding.
However improbable and lightly treated the love element may be in such stories, it does at least provide the dominant thread of the tale. But we then come to that other modern derivation of the Comedy plot, the type of story where it is the humour which dominates, with the love interest playing only a rather embarrassed supporting role, if it survives at all.
When we use the term ‘comedy’ in the modern world we usually mean no more than something we are intended to find funny. It might seem odd to have taken so long to get round to what it is about Comedy which makes us laugh, because of course provoking an audience to laughter has always been inseparable from Comedy, right back to the days of ancient Greece. Only in comparatively recent times has this ‘comic’ element emerged as something which can be looked on as wholly separate, in its own right. But ever since Aristophanes, the essence of Comedy has lain in exposing as ridiculous the state of self-delusion which affects human beings who have become isolated from those around them by their egocentricity. This is essentially what our human capacity for seeing something as funny is about. The chief function of humour is that it provides us with a more or less harmless way to defuse the social strains created by egotism. This is why comedy of any kind almost invariably centres on people who are in some way taking themselves too seriously, giving the rest of us the chance to see how foolish this makes them look. If a little old lady walking down the street trips up on a banana skin, we do not see this as funny. It arouses sympathy. If the same thing happens to a pompous man cocooned in self-importance we find it comical, precisely because we enjoy seeing his bubble of self-esteem being pricked, Almost all Comedy intended to make us laugh is thus centred on such a contrast between the self-regarding delusion of someone who is in some way blinded by egotism, and our capacity to see from outside what he is unable to see. We even do it, of course, when we laugh self-deprecatingly at ourselves.
Nothing seems funnier to us than the sight of someone imagining that he has the world around him organised and under control, when in fact we can see that it is nothing of the kind. This was why audiences for The Music Box (1931) found it funny to see Oliver Hardy, the earnest fat man in a bowler hat, trying to work out with his hapless partner Stan Laurel how to move a grand piano up a flight of steps, only to see it constantly slipping out of their grasp. This was why British television audiences in the 1970s laughed at the sight of Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese in the series Fawlty Towers, desperately trying to preserve his persona as a coolly efficient hotel proprietor and to persuade his guests that everything is in perfect order, while behind the scenes it is only too obvious that all his establishment’s arrangements are sliding into chaos. The same basic joke inspired Groucho Marx’s role as a hotel manager in A Night in Casablanca. In the 1980s it was essentially the same joke which underlay the spectacle of Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby engaging in their game of ruthless rivalry in Yes Minister, the British television series written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn. The ambitious politician and the devious civil servant are each pursuing their own agenda behind an outward mask of civility and the pretence that their only concern is the public good. We see how, beneath the surface, the vain, gullible minister is really driven by egocentric calculations of how he might win plaudits or avoid criticism from the media and his colleagues. The outwardly deferential official is secretly trying to manipulate and outmanoeuvre his supposed master, to promote his own interests as head of his department. What makes us laugh is that we the audience are allowed to see both sides, self-delusion and reality. We can always see exactly what is going on behind the two men’s respective personas, as each episode builds up some situation which promises to create maximum embarrassment for minister, civil servant or both. We also know that eventually, in the nick of time, some form of ‘recognition’ will take place, allowing face to be saved and everyone to end happily.
Indeed, beneath the surface of these modern comedies which are primarily intended just to make us laugh, it is striking how far they are still shaped by those basic situations and rules of the Comedy plot going back thousands of years, as when Laurel and Hardy based one of their best-known films Our Relations on the plot of a comedy written in Rome in the third century BC. The only real difference lies in the extent to which the emphasis is placed on the ‘comic’ element at the expense of the rest of the underlying story. For instance, a typical Marx Brothers film when they were at the height of their fame in the 1930s and 1940s showed a little community of people working together (a circus, a sanitarium, a department store, a hotel), the future of which is threatened by a powerful dark figure engaged with his cronies in a conspiracy to pull off some villainous coup. This casts a shadow over all those threatened with disaster if the villainy succeeds. These invariably include a pair of young lovers wanting to get married who, in traditional Comedy terms, are technically the hero and heroine of the story. But our main attention is inevitably reserved for the fooling and wisecracking of the three stars themselves. Groucho is usually passing himself off raffishly as some figure with vaguely superior pretensions (such as a doctor, lawyer or hotel manager). Chico and Harpo play unashamedly ‘inferior’ lower-class characters. Between them they eventually manage, usually by spending some time in disguise or under assumed identities, to outwit the ‘dark’ figures and save the day. And this, of course, to provide the story with its archetypal ending, finally paves the way for the young lovers to get married.
This plot appeared, with slight variation, in the most popular of the Marx Brothers films, A Night at The Opera (1935). Groucho, as the supposedly well-connected Otis B. Driftwood, is trying to get the rich and gullible older woman Mrs Claypool (played by Margaret Dumont) into society. The ambitious Hermann Gottlieb who runs the New York Opera Company, greedy for her money, suggests that if she would pay 1000 dollars a night, they could hire the world’s greatest tenor, Rodolphe Laspari. Groucho goes over to Europe to hire him, and Laspari turns out to be the chief dark figure of the story: arrogant, rude and condescending. They sail for New York on a luxury liner, with Laspari’s leading lady, the heroine Rosa; while in an ‘inferior realm’ below decks as stowaways are Chico, Harpo and the hero Ricardo, also a tenor, with whom Rosa is in love. The stowaways manage to land by disguising themselves in beards as ‘heroic foreign aviators’, then go into hiding. When rehearsals begin Rosa is sacked, for failing to respond on stage to Laspari because he is so arrogant and unpleasant. The brothers scheme to ensure that the opera’s first night is a shambles, as from behind the scenes they arrange that the scenery from several different operas should whizz on and off in bewildering array. Laspari is booed off the stage and Gottlieb is at his wits end; until Ricardo and Rosa emerge from the shadows to sing like angels and save the day. Their performance is wildly acclaimed. They are hired and can get married.
The love interest tended to play a similarly subordinate role in that other celebrated twentieth-century vehicle for so many of the traditional devices of Comedy, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse (who also, in his youth, wrote a number of American musicals). Nevertheless it is still usually there to play a crucial role in shaping the plot, as in Leave it to Psmith (1923). The hero has fallen in love with a girl who has just got a job cataloguing the library at Blandings Castle, the seat of the Earl of Emsworth. By improbably disguising himself as a Canadian poet, he himself wins an invitation to stay at the castle. Most of the fun-and games of the story then centres on the way the pair manage to outwit a hapless pair of disguised international jewel thieves who are trying to steal Lady Constance’s diamond necklace. By the end of a sequence of entirely familiar Comedy situations, the dark figures have been exposed, all lost objects have been found (including the stolen necklace and the noble Earl’s glasses) and the hero has re-emerged in his true identity to claim the heroine. But it cannot be said that the love interest serves any real purpose other than to lend theme to a hilarious farce; and this is even truer of most of the tales involving the silly-ass Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, with the Lady Bracknell-like figure of Aunt Agatha invariably hovering disapprovingly in the background.
In the English-speaking world Jeeves has become the most famous servant in the history of Comedy. His role is the entirely familiar one of the socially ‘inferior’ figure who eventually redeems the disorder which is afflicting the ‘upper world’. In The Inimitable Jeeves (1924), Wooster’s friend Bingo Little, whose weakness is constantly falling romantically in love, develops an overwhelming passion for a humble teashop waitress. As usual, he immediately wishes to marry her; but the obstacle in the way is his rich and stuffy uncle, the source of Bingo’s allowance, who will certainly oppose such a socially unsuitable match in the role of ‘unrelenting parent’ and thus deny Bingo his only means of income. Jeeves conceives a plan whereby Bingo will introduce his uncle to the works of an authoress named Rosie M. Banks, who specialises in sentimental romances in which girls of lowly origin marry men of superior station. Like most of Jeeves’s schemes, it works like a treat, even to the point where Bertie is sent round to plead Bingo’s case for getting married, implausibly impersonating Rosie M. Banks (Bingo has explained to his uncle that Wooster writes the novels he so admires under a pseudonym). So successfully is the uncle won over to the view that upper-class men should marry lower-class girls that he himself then proposes marriage to his cook. But all, alas, in vain because the waitress has now called off her affair with Bingo.
We then follow more of Bingo’s ill-fated romances, including another journey into an ‘inferior realm’ where he disguises himself as a bearded revolutionary in order to woo Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, the daughter of the leader of a tiny revolutionary sect. He is eventually unmasked and his beard ripped off, just after he has directed a blast of revolutionary abuse at his uncle, now raised to the peer-age, which not unnaturally leads to his allowance being finally cut off. The story comes to its climax when Bingo falls in love with yet another waitress and this time actually marries her. Bertie is again sent round to plead his case impersonating Rosie M. Banks, and the uncle is softened into receiving Bingo and his waitress to bless their marriage. But it then emerges that the waitress herself is none other than the real Rosie M. Banks, who had only adopted the disguise of a waitress to gather material for another novel (the heroine emerging from ‘inferior disguise’ in her true identity as an ‘upper world’ character). Only deft footwork by Jeeves, in conveying that Bertie is a lunatic who had misled everyone into thinking that he was Rosie M. Banks, saves the day so that Bingo’s uncle renews his allowance (while Wooster, as the exposed ‘dark’ figure, discreetly leaves the stage).
Of course not all twentieth-century Comedy reflected this split between the romantic and comic elements in the plot. There continued to be many comedies where the two components were still woven together, as in Stanley Donen’s musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Set in Hollywood in 1927, when silent movies were giving way to the ‘talkies’ (and using songs, including the title number, originally written in that period), the story centres on two silent stars, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). Lina, the chief dark figure of the story, is a shallow, self-centred monster, so deluded by the dream-world of Hollywood that she believes the romantic relationship they act out on the screen is meant to carry over into real life. But Don meets and falls in love with a young, serious actress, Kathy (Debbie Reynolds). The hinge of the plot comes when the studio decides it has to put its two romantic stars into a talking-picture. Lina’s grating voice, inability to sing and painful Bronx accent threaten disaster until Don’s song-and-dance partner Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) has the clever idea of using Kathy to dub Lina’s voice on-screen. It is the hero’s joyous response to this proposal which prompts Kelly’s famous tap-dance to the title song (originally written for The Hollywood Revue in 1929), which has become probably the best-known sequence in the history of the cinema. Thanks to Kathy’s voice, the first ‘Lockwood-Lamont musical’ is a triumph, and the crafty Lina tries to blackmail the studio into keeping Kathy on anonymously in the shadows, as her secret ‘screen voice’. But when she recklessly appears to sing before a packed live theatre audience she is in danger of being exposed, until Cosmo places Kathy behind a curtain to supply Lina’s singing voice. The audience is fooled until, at a crucial moment, the curtain is drawn to reveal what is really going on (a perfect example of Aristotelian anagnorisis). The humiliated Lina flees the stage as ‘unreconciled dark figure’. Kathy, the ‘obscured heroine’, emerges from the shadows as the real star. And the story ends with hero and heroine in loving embrace, in front of a billboard advertising their first film together.3
Seven years later, however, Hollywood produced perhaps its most celebrated example of the sending-up of the Comedy plot in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959). Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two dance musicians in the Chicago of the 1920s who unwittingly find themselves witnessing the St Valentine’s Day massacre, in which the members of a criminal gang are machine-gunned by their rivals. Realising that the murder gang will ruthlessly track them down to eliminate them, the pair disguise themselves as female dance musicians, Daphne and Josephine, and join an all-girl band heading for Florida. Here Curtis disguises himself back again as a man, posing as a millionaire in order to woo the prettiest of the girl musicians (Marilyn Monroe). Lemmon is in turn wooed in his female guise by a genuine but aged millionaire, Osgood E. Fielding III, who is so enamoured that, as the film ends, he proposes marriage. Trying one excuse after another to explain how this is totally out of the question, Lemmon finally pulls off his wig to reveal that he is a man. Even this does not deter the doting suitor, who merely replies ‘well, nobody’s perfect’.
Later in the book we shall consider just why the Comedy plot should have come to be so widely burlesqued in this way (a parallel development can be seen in the fate of the other basic plots). But in view of all these highly improbable marriages and unions at the end of modern comedies, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the only way in which the twentieth century could be claimed to have extended the range of the traditional Comedy plot was in the type of story where the hero and heroine have not only been married before the story opens, but also divorced. The interest of the plot then lies in seeing how they are eventually brought together again to remarry.
The earliest instance of such a story, regarded in its time as highly daring, was Noel Coward’s play Private Lives (1933). The heroine goes off on honeymoon with her second husband, only to find that the next room in their hotel is occupied by her first husband, on honeymoon with his new wife. Plunged into this embarrassing situation, the heroine and her first husband gradually discover that they still love each other rather than their new partners, and by the end they are reunited.
Another instance of this twist to the plot was The Philadelphia Story (1940), originally written as a romantic comedy for Hollywood and later adapted to make the even better-known film musical High Society (1956). We meet the heroine, Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn/Grace Kelly), a rich, beautiful and frigid society girl, in her family’s grand house (originally in Philadelphia, in the musical version at Newport, Long Island). Having been divorced from her first husband, Dexter Haven, she is making preparations for her wedding the following day to the new man in her life, a socially ambitious nouveau riche. When the relaxed and genial Dexter (Cary Grant/Bing Crosby) then strolls in to remind her teasingly of the happy romantic times when they were still in love, this begins to sow painful doubts in her mind. He tells her the only reason she has accepted her new fiancé is that he treats her like a goddess on a pedestal, and that her desire to be worshipped is her great weakness. At a lavish eve of wedding ball, Tracy gets drunk and recklessly wanders off to enjoy an amorous liaison with a handsome, raffish newspaperman (James Stewart/Frank Sinatra), who has been sent to cover the event for a vulgar gossip sheet. This descent into an ‘inferior realm’ thaws her out of her icy frigidity, and liberates her into becoming a different woman: with the result that she and her stuffy fiancé have a flaming row. With a crowd of fashionable guests already assembled for the wedding and the organ ready to strike up ‘Here Comes The Bride’, she decides to call the wedding off. She is nervously standing at the door, wondering how to explain it to the guests, when Dexter materialises at her shoulder, having recognised that the goddess has stepped down from her pedestal and become the warmer, softer, feminine girl he always knew she had it in her to be. He whispers to her what she is to say and, as she dutifully repeats his words to the guests, she suddenly realises that she is announcing that there is to be a wedding after all, and that she is about to remarry her first husband. Deliriously happy, she walks up the aisle, recognising that it is him she has really loved all along.
However novel this situation may seem, it is really only a contemporary version of that theme which has run through Comedy since the time of Menander: the lovers who are separated by a misunderstanding, and may even temporarily go off with other parties, but are eventually reconciled. It was precisely the situation that shaped that apparently revolutionary drama of the 1950’s, Look Back in Anger (1956), which few would have dared at the time to describe as a mere ‘comedy’. In a cramped flat in a dingy Midlands city, Jimmy Porter is perpetually arguing with his wife, Alison, until eventually he escapes with her friend Helen. He recognises that he is no better off and that it is Alison he really loves. He returns home, makes up his quarrel with Alison, and they end happily reunited in their childish fantasy of ‘squirrels and bears’.
Only towards the end of the twentieth century, however, did modern Comedy finally manage to turn the outward conventions of the time-honoured plot completely on their head. The hero of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), played by Hugh Grant, is one of a group of young friends who, one after another, get married (or in one case, die). After the first wedding, he has a one-night affair with another guest, an American girl, but she returns to America. Eventually, as the sequence of weddings unfolds, the hero becomes so desperate at seeing all his friends married off that he proposes to another member of the group who is similarly on the shelf. As the guests all gather in church for what it seems will be the final wedding of the story, the hero sees in the congregation the American girl he has never been able to get out of his mind. The bride is already standing at the altar when the hero and his American friend manage to escape from the church and run off together into the rain. Declaring undying love for each other, they agree their love is so real that it would be a mistake for them ever to get married.
After more than 2000 years of comedies in which the climax was the moment when the hero and heroine could at last head off to their wedding, here was one which might have seemed the complete inversion: a story made up of a whole succession of weddings, but in which the resolution finally came with hero and heroine agreeing, as ultimate proof that their love was real, that they should not get married. However, it was only the outward form which had been stood on its head. The story still ended, after all their separations, misunderstandings and pairing off with the wrong partners, with hero and heroine coming together in recognition of their loving union. For all its seeming reversal of convention, the underlying power of the Comedy plot still brought the story to its irresistible archetypal conclusion.
Comedy cannot be summarised in quite the same way as the other basic plots because the very nature of the plot requires it to cover such a range of variations. But the essence of the story is always that:
(1) we see a little world in which people have passed under a shadow of confusion, uncertainty and frustration, and are shut off from one another;
(2) the confusion gets worse until the pressure of darkness is at its most acute and everyone is in a nightmarish tangle;
(3) finally, with the coming to light of things not previously recognised, perceptions are dramatically changed. The shadows are dispelled, the situation is miraculously transformed and the little world is brought together in a state of joyful union.
The key to Comedy is thus the transition between two general states. The first which persists through most of the story is a kind of twilight in which nothing is seen clearly; where people’s true nature or identity may be obscured; and where there may be uncertainty as to who should end up with whom. The chief cause of the twilight is usually some central dark figure, who is in some way acting blindly and heartlessly. It is his (or her) egocentricity which is throwing everyone else into the shadows, and setting people at odds with one another. And nothing symbolises this state of division more powerfully than that it is keeping apart the hero and heroine of the story. The second state arrives with the ‘recognition’ and ‘unknotting’ when, at the climax of the story, the dark figure is in some way caught out, and all is at last seen clearly. Everyone’s true nature and identity is revealed; everyone recognises who is his or her proper ‘other half’; and the story ends, with darkness and division at an end, on the image of a great coming together. What was dark is now light. What was divided is now whole. And nothing symbolises this more completely than the union of hero and heroine.
During the first, twilit period, the world presented by the story is usually divided in some way into an ‘upper realm’, where the story’s chief source of darkness holds sway, and a ‘lower realm’ in the shadows. It is ‘below the line’, in the ‘inferior realm’ that the seeds of life and truth, the potential for love and the ability to see whole are to be found: obscured from the dominant ‘upper realm’ until they are ready to be brought up into the light, to bring both halves of the world together.
Within the context of this general pattern, the great majority of stories shaped by the Comedy plot fall into two main types.
The first is where the chief source of darkness throwing a shadow over the proceedings is some character other than the hero (e.g., an unrelenting father or a ‘dark rival’) who dominates everyone else in a way which creates unhappiness and confusion and is opposed to the flow of life. In such a story the chief victims consigned to the shadows are likely to be the hero and heroine; and they can only be raised up into the light and brought together when the dark figure either has his eyes opened and goes through a change of heart, or is exposed and pushed off the stage.
The second is where the chief dark figure is the hero himself. It is then the wronged heroine, standing for true feeling and the ability to see whole, who is most obviously in the shadows. Here, to reach the happy ending, it is necessary for the hero to go through a change of heart and ‘come to himself’. As he is liberated, so also is the heroine, so they can emerge together into the light. In those rare examples where the heroine is the dark figure, it is her own repressed inner feminity which is obscured. It is this which the loving hero perceives and brings out, so that she likewise goes through the change of heart necessary to bring about the happy ending.
There is a third type of Comedy where there is no obvious dark figure in the usual sense, and where the source of confusion is simply a general state of misunderstanding which has everyone in its grip (e.g., The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Guys and Dolls, Four Weddings and a Funeral). But here the resolution can still only be reached when the redeeming truth is won from the shadows. And here we see more clearly than ever how the real preoccupation of Comedy is consciousness: what people are aware of. The real cause of confusion and conflict is always that the characters are not fully conscious of the truth, either about other people or about themselves; and while they are in this limited state of awareness they remain shut off from one another. What dispels the confusion is that their awareness is finally opened out so that they can see everything and everyone, including themselves, straight and whole. It is this which enables them to feel properly and to discover how they can all relate to each other in a state of unity and love: because they have at last ‘seen the light’.
We can now look at the plot of Comedy in the context of the other types of story we considered earlier.
Like the other plots, it conjures up a world in which the threatening power of darkness is, through most of the story, in some way or other dominant. As in the others, this pressure is likely to reach its height just before the end, in the story’s climax. As in the others, there then follows the reversal, the miraculous liberation, so that the story can end on an image of wholeness and completion.
In the first three plots, Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches and the Quest, we saw an essentially light hero or heroine, overshadowed by dark figures, moving towards the moment when the darkness is overthrown and they can at last emerge completely into the light. In the most fully developed examples of the Voyage and Return story, we saw a hero who begins by displaying some of the characteristics of a dark figure himself, but who is eventually liberated from the dark forces closing round him in the ‘other world’ by the fact that he has switched to become a light figure.
In Comedy we see both patterns at work. Sometimes, as in the earlier types of story, the hero and heroine are essentially light but overshadowed by some other dominant dark figure, who has to make the switch to light so that hero and heroine can be united. Sometimes, as in those Voyage and Return examples, the hero himself is dark and it is his switch to light which is necessary to pave the way to the happy ending. In either form, Comedy differs from the earlier types of story, where the dark figures opposed to the hero or heroine went through no change of heart but were simply cleared out of the way at the end by being discomfited or overthrown (although even in Comedy some vestige of this remains in those examples where the ‘unreconciled dark figure’ is caught out and pushed off the stage). Only in Comedy is it the general tendency for all the characters to be brought to light and reconciled, to produce the story’s closing image of a little world wholly united.
Even so, what all the types of story we have looked at so far have in common is that they show the power of darkness itself having to be vanquished as the precondition of the hero or heroine being able to enjoy a happy ending. What we are now about to consider for the first time is what happens in stories when the central figure becomes dark and does not go through a change of heart, but remains dark right to the end. This produces a kind of story which in some respects is quite unlike any of those we have previously looked at. Except that ultimately, as we shall see, the fundamental rules which govern its unfolding are entirely consistent with those which govern the structure of the other plots.
In surveying the earlier plots we ended by looking briefly at the ‘dark’ versions of each type of story: examples where the underlying patterns fails to work out to its proper, happy conclusion. In the case of Comedy it might seem a contradiction in terms that there could be a ‘dark’ version, in that if ‘recognition’ and a change of heart fail to take place as the precondition of a happy ending, the story can scarcely be regarded as a Comedy. How then would we describe such a tale?
Let us consider a familiar example. We see a hero who falls in love with a beautiful heroine. She loves him and despite strong initial opposition from her father, who regards him as ‘inferior’, they get married. But the hero unwittingly gives offence to a jealous, embittered third party, who becomes the chief dark figure of the story. The dark figure determines to get his revenge, and begins to drop hints to the hero that his young wife is being unfaithful to him. The villain hatches a dark plot, involving a lost handkerchief, supposedly given by the heroine to her lover. The hero is taken in and becomes deranged with rage. If this were a Comedy, when confusion and misunderstanding have reached their height, this is where the process of ‘recognition’ would begin to clear things up. The true explanation of the lost handkerchief would come to light. The dark figure would be exposed for the villain he is. The hero would recognise he had dreadfully wronged his wife, and would be filled with contrition. Finally hero and heroine would be reconciled, and all would end happily. As we all know, however, the story does not end like that, precisely because there is no ‘recognition’. Othello is not a comedy, and it leads us on to the next plot.