Shakespeare and Sitcoms

Lee Lady

 
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Albert Bermel, Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (editors), Players of Shakespeare, 2
John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance
Marvin and Ruth Thompson (editors), Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance
J. L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century
Levin Ludwig Schüking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays
Jay L. Halio, Understanding Shakespeare's Plays in Performance
Ejner J. Jensen, Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy
Michael W. Shurgot, Stages of Play: Shakespeare's Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
David Grote, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition
Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, Shakespeare Alive
John Barton and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Playing Shakespeare
John Barton & the Royal Shakespeare Company, Television Series on Performing Shakespeare
 
 

Narrative is not, finally, memorable; one forgets stories and even outcomes and remembers moments, just as in life one forgets years, even decades, and remembers moments.
     --- Larry McMurtry, Film Flam

The biggest mistake that we make about Shakespeare is that we think of him as a writer. To understand Shakespeare we need to start with the simple fact that he was in the entertainment business of his day. Shakespeare's business was to create plays. Certainly one part of this process was to write the speeches and dialogue for the characters. But the lines of dialogue, the script, were not the play, any more than a screenplay is a movie, especially in the case of Shakespeare's productions, which were actually variety shows within the overall framework of a drama. (See Homer Swander's essay "Shakespeare and Beckett," reprinted in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Marvin & Ruth Thompson.)

A modern playwright generally thinks of writing a script as his primary purpose, and actually producing it as only a necessary and less creative secondary activity needed to make the play available to the public. But everything we know of Shakespeare indicates that for him it was the opposite. Producing the play was the primary goal, and writing it was only one of the necessary steps toward achieving that goal.

This may be a partial explanation of the fact that there is such an enormous amount of ambiguity in Shakespeare's plays. It sometimes seems like almost every single line in the plays is capable of being interpreted in at least two diametrically opposite ways, and yet there is no indication at all that Shakespeare were intentionally striving for ambiguity. (Admittedly, though, some of the interpretations one finds in the critical literature are simply perverse, the result of critics who approach the plays from a particular agenda of their own that would have been quite bizarre to Shakespeare. I don't think it would even have occurred to him that Shylock might be seen as a sympathetic character, or that there might have been some motive deeper than playful teasing behind the ring trick in the Merchant of Venice, or that Polonius might have been seen as something other than a buffoon.) A playwright who was writing scripts to be performed by troupes which he was not a part of might have been more careful in carefully spelling out his meanings, but in Shakespeare's case, he didn't need to worry that his actors might choose incorrect interpretations, because he would be there to instruct them in their performances. (And apparently a somewhat lengthy instruction from the playwright was an important part of the rehearsal process in Elizabethan theatres.)

Northrop Frye, in his book A Natural Perspective, writes

It is a striking and perennially mysterious feature of Shakespeare, as of many of his contemporaries, that he seems to have been so absorbed in the theatrical process as to be largely indifferent to anything outside it, such as the advance in his reputation that a folio edited and proofread by him would have made. [The folio editions were the quality editions of the plays. All the folio editions of Shakespeare's plays were published after his death, edited by his friends. The cheaper, and mostly less reliable, quarto editions were also not edited by Shakespeare himself, and were often bootleg editions.] His plays bring us close to the oral tradition [of storytellers], with its shifting and kaleidoscopic variants, its migrating themes and motifs, its tolerance of interpolation, its detachment from the printed ideal of an established text. Sometimes we may even be in doubt whether an entire play is a garbled version of Shakespeare or the work of someone else.

It is in fact not so mysterious that someone whose life was devoted to producing theatrical entertainment should have had so little interest in a very different realm, namely literature. In Shakespeare's time, drama was not considered a form of literature and got about as little respect from the literary world of his day that romance novels or sitcoms do today.

Shakespeare was not a man of leisure who could devote himself to literature. But he did have a talent for putting words together in a way that people enjoyed. Someone in more fortunate circumstances might have used this sort of talent to create something that in his time might have been considered literature. Shakespeare instead used it to create a form of entertainment that people in his day held in as much contempt as we today hold sitcoms. From what we know, the idea that people would ever think of his plays as primarily pieces of literature to be read would have been as strange to Shakespeare as it is to us to think of people finding pleasure in reading screenplays or the teleplays for sitcoms. And Shakespeare's plays were essentially the sitcoms of the Elizabethan period, in contrast to the more "elevated" plays of playwrights such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, or Ben Jonson (all of whose plays seem to hold much less interest for us today).

In a way, I think that we are fortunate that there were no movie cameras or videocameras in Shakespeare's time. Because if we could see his plays in the way they were originally performed, I think we might still be despising them in the same way people despise sitcoms.

I do believe, on the evidence of the texts themselves, that Shakespeare often enjoyed the writing process. He was obviously a person who was fascinated by words and the ways that words may be used. And I believe that he was often proud of what he had written. But it is pretty clear that he thought of his words as things to be spoken by actors, not things to be read from a printed page.

If Shakespeare had had any concern about establishing a literary reputation, the route to that goal would have been by way of his sonnets. They fit the Elizabethan paradigm for literature.

When critics want to fit Shakespeare into the historical development of English literature, they generally think only in terms of published plays, because after all that's all that has left a written record for critics to look at. But a big part of what made Shakespeare the sort of playwright he was, I believe (along with a number of scholars who are much better qualified to make such judgements than I am), was precisely that he did not think of himself in terms of that tradition. As a producer of entertainments, he took from any source that seemed to offer the promise of pleasing his public, and this included not only the poetic drama of his time, much of which now survives in written form, but also the sort of popular entertainment one might call folk drama, probably mostly in the form of short skits rather than full-length plays, perhaps vaguely similar to the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. Scripts for these were never published and probably often not written down at all and so we now know of them only through brief historical allusions.

According to the book Shakespeare Alive! by Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland,

In the little villages and hamlets sprinkled across the country, drama was a part of daily life. Throughout the middle ages and up until 1576 (when Shakespeare's first London theatre was constructed), acting in plays wasn't a separate occupation limited to trained professionals in a permanent theatre. It was merry-making, a participatory activity, something everyone could do for fun during holidays, church festivals, and harvest celebrations...

In Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, C.L. Barber tells of of a rather notorious play produced by one Talboys Dymoke "to be played in for sport and merriment at the setting up of a Maypole in South Kyme (Lincolnshire)." The play was an attack on the Earl of Lincoln, who was fairly generally despised in the region and was especially an enemy of Talboys Dymoke and his brother Sir Edward Dymoke.

Talboys Dymoke, being the then principal actor, did first counterfeit the person of the Earl and his speeches and gestures. Roger Bayard, who acted the Devil and carried off the Earl (as played by Talboys), in another part of the play did represent the part of Fool, and the part of the Vice. In the interlude there was a dirge sung by Taloys Dymoke and the others wherein they expressed by name most of the known lewd and licentious women in the cities of London and Lincoln and town of Boston, concluding in their songs after every one of their names, ora pro novis [pray for us].

Now one might consider the possibility that this particular play was exceptional. The account of it survives because it was a notorious case, resulting in a suit brought against Dymoke by the Earl of Lincoln. Moreover, the play was performed on the last Sunday of August in 1601, at which time Shakespeare's career was already well under way, so that it is possible that Dymoke's play was influenced by Shakespeare's dramas rather than being an example of a type of play that influenced Shakespeare.

But Dymoke's defense in the lawsuit, as well as claiming that the play never explicitly mentioned the Earl of Lincoln, stated that the play was merely a traditional part of the festival games. This seems to indicate, as Barber suggests, that this sort of festive drama was a fairly common and long-standing tradition.

In Shakespeare Alive, Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland add,

There were also of course traveling minstrels attached to the households of noble patrons. These entertainers crisscrossed the countryside singing and dancing for an audience they could scrape together.

It seems to me that it must have been from such traveling comedians that Shakespeare learned the sort of clowning around that forms a part of all his plays, especially the comedies, and which gave him the idea for the sort of monologue the clown Launce offers about his dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Shakespeare and Vaudeville

From reading Northrop Frye's essay on comedy in The Anatomy of Criticism, I knew that from the time of the ancient Greeks until modern sitcoms certain structural elements of comedy have persisted, especially certain character types, such the the heavy-handed father, the ingenue, and the wise-cracking cynic.

The hypothesis that the resemblance between Shakespeare's comedies as originally performed and contemporary sitcoms might go far beyond some of the structural elements of comedy as laid out by Northrop Frye fascinated me to such an extent that I wound up investing an enormous amount of time in watching filmed versions of almost all of the plays (almost all of which I had read during my teens and many of which I had read again fairly recently) and reading a great deal of the critical literature on Shakespeare. I was also enlightened by the wonderful series of television programs by John Barton and the Royal Shakespeare Company discussing the various aspects of performing Shakespeare (partly available in the book Playing Shakespeare, by John Barton and the RSC). These programs explore the various aspects of performing Shakespeare's prose and verse. At the same time, though, they sometimes take a frankly modern approach to such issues as characterization and motivation, which was not very helpful to my at attempt to understand what the plays would have been like as originally performed.

The Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's most stylized play. Furthermore there is far from universal agreement that Peter Hall's production represents the correct way to perform Shakespeare. But even after all my reading and after having seen many other productions of Shakespeare, it still seems clear to me that there are certain qualities in Shakespeare's plays that really lend themselves to the approach Peter Hall's production used, and I still believe that the Peter Hall performance of the Dream exemplifies the spirit of the plays as Shakespeare's own troupe performed them in a way that most other modern performances of Shakespeare's plays I have seen do not, wonderful although some of them are.

Eventually, toward the end of my investigations, I came across J. L. Styan's book The Shakespeare Revolution (1977), which, among other things, contains a very comprehensive survey of the various attitudes towards the performance of Shakespeare over the past two hundred years. It nicely summarized all the little scraps of enlightenment I had found elsewhere and conclusively showed me that the insights I had started with were in fact a mere hundred years old (but not at all out of date).

I eventually realized that when it seemed to me as though Shakespeare reminded me of sitcoms, what I was really thinking of was the old radio and television "comedy hours" of my youth, such as the Jack Benny Show and the Burns & Allen Show, which were a modern continuation of the tradition of vaudeville. (David Grote classifies these as sitcoms. But they were certainly very different than what we now think of as sitcoms. Grote thinks of them as much more sophisticated than later sitcoms.)

Once I started thinking in terms of the word vaudeville (or what the British call music hall comedy) rather than sitcom, I realized that the evidence needed to confirm my hypothesis was all around me, in every book I had ever looked in about Shakespeare's Elizabethan theatre. (I use the word "Elizabethan" as a convenience, although of course Shakespeare's career extended past the death of Elizabeth into the realm of James I.)

Certainly we know that Shakespeare's productions included many of the elements of vaudeville, such as songs, juggling, dancing, tumbling, and in fact just about any type of entertainment that it's possible to perform on a stage. The Fool in the play did a little jig at the end as part of his performance. And many critics have noted (although usually to deplore it) the ressemblance of much of the comedy in the plays to vaudeville numbers.

All of this suggests that possibility that the scenes in one of Shakespeare's plays, as originally performed, were much more like comedy turns or skits on a vaudeville stage (or, I will suggest, like a musical comedy) than like the Chekhov-derived drama one finds in contemporary theatres.

In this respect, I was especially struck by Ejner Jensen's comments on As You Like It in his book Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy. He talks about the prevalence in this play of interchanges between characters that serve no actual purpose except as performance pieces played for the benefit of an audience of other characters within the play. For instance Jensen says that in the opening scene between Rosalind and Celia, after giving a little rather rushed exposition, "both women turn gladly to talk that serves chiefly as a means of exhibiting their vitality and wit, a means of display." About Touchstone, Jensen writes, "Touchstone functions throughout the play as a stand-up comedian, a figure never wholly integrated into the play's overall movement." Jensen sees this as a distinctive feature of As You Like It, but certainly one can frequently see the same thing in other plays, except that usually the little performance pieces are played for the benefit of the theatre audience, not an audience within the play itself.

The Shakespearean Stage

Drama today is generally performed on a stage with three apparent walls, behind a proscenium, with a curtain that rises and falls. The audience arrives and sits down quietly, respectfully, before the performance begins. During the performance, the audience sits in the dark in silence looking at an artfully lighted stage.

Most often the modern stage is used to give the audience the illusion of looking into a room. The performance attempts to present an illusion of overheard conversation. In 1919 Levin Ludwig Schüking, in his book Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays, described the effect created by the modern theatre by saying,

[Contemporary] drama is enacted under the tacit assumption that there are no spectators present.

The Elizabethan stage, on the other hand, was a stage that minimized the esthetic separation between actors and audience rather than attempting to create an illusion of reality. As shown in the sketch of the Swann discovered by Gaedertz, the Shakespearean stage was a "thrust stage" that had no walls (and so no proscenium, no curtain) and was surrounded by the audience on three sides. It was much more like the stage on which a rock and roll band might play today in a stadium than a modern theatrical stage. (There was however a shallow room at the rear of the stage for playing indoor scenes and also a sort of balcony.)

In his book The Shakespearean Revolution, J. L Styan, referring to William Poel's 1925 comments on the nature of Shakespearean theatre, states that contemporary drama attempts to present a supposed re-enactment of an event at some other given time and place. But in Shakespeare's plays, on the contrary, at least in Poel's conception,

Careless of time and place, the audience concentrated upon the persons of the play and what they did; there was a single place, which was "here," and a single time, which was "now."

Actors considered it perfectly proper to interrupt the flow of action to make a joke or a comment to the audience. The audience responded actively and sometimes attempted to climb onto the stage to participate.

This is much the same tradition that one finds in vaudeville. Sitcoms seem to be somewhat intermediate between this conception and that of more serious theatre.

Shakespeare put on his plays in several different theatres, all of them quite small and intimate by modern standards. Originally they were all outdoor theatres. Later on, after the Globe burned down, Shakespeare's troupe built Blackfriars, an indoor theatre with torches on the wall which enabled the plays to be performed in the evenings. Even so, though, there was nothing comparable to modern stage lighting.

As mentioned, vendors in Shakespeare's theatres were wandering through the audience selling hot foods, so that the overall atmosphere was more like that of a baseball game than a contemporary theatre.

Shakespeare's Public

The inhabitants of London were tradesmen, not persons of fashion. The court was not yet regularly established at Westminster and it had not yet become a matter of course for a courtier to have a house in London. It was enough to take lodgings there when called to Westminster for legal, Court, legal, or Parliamentary duties. Otherwise, the only reason for living in London was that one worked or traded there. The London playgoer for whom Shakespeare wrote, although not necessarily uneducated, was not a gentleman of leisure seeking a fashionable sensation, but a businessman or law student seeking entertainment after a day's work in the shop, counting-house, or one of the Inns of Court.

The introduction and development in later years of a leisured London population has meant that we regard [Shakespeare's plays] from a standpoint diametrically opposite to that of the commercially minded Elizabethan Londoner.

Speeches not Conversations

Although in comparison to other Elizabethan dramatists, Shakespeare's characters often sound amazing like real people, yet, just as in contemporary sitcoms and many modern films, they are the sort of people who manage to be clever all of the time and always find the perfect way to say what they have to say. Even when Shakespeare's characters are stupid, they still manage to be stupid in a clever way. Just as in sitcoms and many films, the way in which something is said is often more important that the actual message.

Ejner Jensen, in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, says in reference to As You Like It, "It is tempting to say that Shakespeare's chief device of presentation is the duologue rather than the dialogue, for again and again he sets before us two characters who provide exposition, argue opposed positions, or simply take up roles without any sense that their performances are generated by the necessity of moving the dramatic situation forward."

In contrast to plays by Chekhov, for instance, actors in a Shakespearean play are very seldom making much pretence of holding an actual conversation. Instead, they make speeches at each other. The same thing is true to a large extent in contemporary sitcoms, as well as in many films, where actors often seem to be almost shout their lines at each other. Rather than attempting an illusion of conversation, they unabashedly direct their lines to the audience.

In The Janus of the Poets, Richard David writes

Dialogue as such was less essential to Elizabethan plays than it is to most modern plays. There were of course the flytings and contests of wit; there were also, in the early plays, those decorative patterns of which the stichomuthia of Richard and Elizabeth, or the alternative dirge over Juliet, are obvious examples. These passages are, however, static in their effect; that is, they may define various emotions in the speaker and arouse them in the audience, but they cause no spiritual development or revolution in either. The true dramatic crises, the dynamic effects which do achieve this, are found in single speeches. For, the feelings of an Elizabethan drama being always explicit, always elaborated in the text, it was possible to sum up fully and clearly in the reaction of a single character a situation and its emotional consequences which today would have to be deduced from the interaction of half a dozen speeches.

Obviously we will never be able to know for certain exactly what the style of acting was like in Shakespeare's theatres. But in his book Shakespeare's Plays in Performance, John Russell Brown gives some fairly convincing scraps of evidence that actors did their best to achieve an illusion of realism in many parts of the performance, rather than using a purely "formal" reading of lines. He quotes Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors (1612)

... turn to our domestic histories. What person of English blood, seeing the person of any bold Englishman presented, and doth not hug his fame, and honey at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprises with his best wishes and, as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his heart all prosperous performance, as if the personator were the man impersonated?

How didst thou sway the theatre! make us feel
The players' wounds were true and their swords steel!
Nay, stranger yet, how often did I know
When the spectators ran to save the blow.
Frozen with grief, we could not stir away,
Until the Epilogue told us 'twas a play.

On the other hand, based on the shape of the stage, the almost completely lack of separation between actors and audience, the fact that performances were given in daylight (until the construction of the indoor torch-lit theatre Blackfriars), the extremely brief rehearsal times, and the fact that acting was not an established profession and actors had no professional training except for on-the-job experience, one can be fairly convinced that the performance as a whole would not be able to present an illusion of reality in the way that a modern performance does.

Of course one thing that is quite clear is that Shakespeare's actors could not rely on the attention of the audience as a given in the same way that actors in a modern theatre can. There is no doubt that actors used every available trick (including very elaborate, and sometimes expensive, costumes) in order to capture the audience's attention. This makes it plausible that acting was often on the melodramatic side. Certainly the quotes John Russell Brown gives suggest that audiences would be more impressed by the convincing way an actor died on stage than by the beautiful speeches he made.

But in my opinion, even without historical evidence, one can conclude a whole lot about the way Shakespeare's plays were performed by looking at the texts themselves. Shakespeare was writing for a troupe of actors he was working with. It doesn't make sense that he would write in a style that would not be compatible with the style of acting his troupe used. One of the things that makes Shakespeare so different from all the dramatists who preceded him is that his characters sound very different from each other, and a character's style of speech is a big part of what characterizes him. It seems highly improbable that Shakespeare would have written this way if his actors used a style of acting that failed to bring this quality out.

And when one finds passages from Shakespeare's clowns that bring to mind Abbot & Costello, it's hard to imagine that Shakespeare could have written them for actors who had no skill in comic delivery.

And consider the following passage from The Merchant of Venice. (One can easily find many other similar ones in the later plays.)

Shylock. Well then, it now appears you need my help.
Go to then. You come to me and you say,
"Shylock, we would have moneys."  You say so,
You that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you did spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshhold! Moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
"Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?"

Shylock.     Why look you, how you storm!
I would be friends with you, and have your love,
Forget the stains that you have shamed me with,
Supply your present wants, and take no doit
Of usance for my money. And you'll not hear me.
This is kind I offer.

On the other hand, it is generally believed that for Elizabethan actors the style of delivery for verse was usually what we would call "recitation," often in somewhat sing-song fashion. Verse was therefore conspicuous and emphasized. I think that the Elizabethan audience responded to verse in a drama with roughly the same attitude we have today about singing in a musical comedy. Of course nobody in real life suddenly bursts into song in the middle of a conversation. But that's one of the things that makes musical comedies so entertaining.

One can find very clear evidence of the way verse was conspicuous and emphasized in Romeo and Juliet, where sixteen lines of dialogue actually form a sonnet.

Romeo. If I profane with my unworthiest hand,
     This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
     My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
     To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
     Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
     For saints have hands which pilgrims hands do touch,
     And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray'r.

Romeo. Oh, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
     They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo. Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.

There is no way that anyone could possibly believe that a real conversation could inadvertently wind up forming a sonnet. And in any case, even to Elizabethans, these lines could not have sounded anything like natural conversation.

The whole point of this interchange is the fact that it forms a sonnet, and certainly Shakespeare would have expected his audience to appreciate it for exactly that reason. I think that for the Elizabethan audience, this would have functioned very much the same way a song duet in a musical comedy does for us.

My guess is that this sort of joint composition of poetry was a game familiar to educated Elizabethans. It is probably a little unrealistic to suppose that two teenagers would be as adept at this game as the play shows, but it seems clear that Shakespeare's intention was to convey the idea that Romeo and Juliet were both very clearly aware that they were composing a sonnet.

When two actors join together to perform a musical or poetic duet in this fashion, there is a sense of complicity, of intimacy, that is at least as important as the actual meaning of the lines. For a production to perform this sonnet in such a way that the rhythm and rhymes are downplayed or use pauses or some other form of separation between the lines of the two actors to make it seem as if they were having a routine conversation rather than cooperating in forming a joint poetic work would be to completely miss the whole point of the duet.

In fact, in terms of the way it uses language, and especially in the abundance of rhymed verse, a great deal of Romeo and Juliet is very much like a musical comedy. I realized this from reading John Russell Brown's comments in Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (although he, of course, does not make the analogy with musicals).

Here, for instance, is one of Romeo's speeches (from Act 1, before he meets Juliet).

Romeo.  Griefs of mine lie so heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propogate, to have it prest
With more of thine; this love that thou hath shown
Doth add much grief to too much of my own.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears;
What is it else, a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

This is very different from the speech of Shylock quoted above. This, especially the last five lines, is not conversation: it's a song.

And one can see the same thing in this brief speech from Juliet at the end of the scene where she first meets Romeo, and has just learned that he is a Montague.

Juliet. My only love, sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy.

John Russel Brown's book made me notice that many of the Beatrice-Benedick interchanges in Much Ado About Nothing, although one might have trouble actually setting them to music, also have a musical comedy quality.

More generally, in A Natural Perspective, Northrop Frye writes,

The only place where the tradition of Shakespearean romantic comedy has survived with any theatrical success is, as we should expect, in opera.... When we look for the most striking modern parallels to Twelfth Night or The Tempest, we think first of all of The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute.

The operatic features of Shakespearean comedy are an integral part of Shakespeare's concentration on the theatrical process. Thematic images and words echo and call and respond in a way which is a constant fascination to someone working with the text. Such repetitions seem to have something oracular about them, as though arranging them in the right way would provide a key to some occult and profound process of thought. In performance, of course, they have the same function that similar repeated patterns have in music. As with music, it would take a superhuman concentration to rotice every repetition consciously, even if we had the kind of clarity in the performance which we take for granted in the concert hall but seldom hear in the theatre.

Yet there is usually so much repetition that, again as in music, even a vague and woolgathering listener is bound to get some sense of design.

As illustrated by the brief speech by Shylock quoted above and as pointed out by Alexander Leggatt (Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies), much of the dialogue in The Merchant of Venice is surprisingly naturalistic in comparison to the other comedies. And yet at the same time, as Frye points out, here too words as well as actions are used to create an almost musical form which is at least as important as the thematic content that critics are generally so concerned with.

In the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, for example, we notice first, how the sequence of events is arranged, not in the order of ordinary credibility (Portia's not-a-scruple-more-or-less point might well have occurred to someone much earlier), but in the order of dramatic suspense. Next, we notice the constant repetition of thematic words, "mercy," "judgment," "will," "bond."  Finally, we notice at the beginning of the courtroom scene the thematic anticipation of its resolution when Bassanio says to Antonio:

The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones, and all,
Ere thou shall lose for me one drop of blood.

Such features as the hidden irony of Antonio's reference to Portia, "Let her be judge," and the emblematic counterpoint of bringing the "balance" of judgement into the action to weigh the pound of flesh, are also thematic devices.

Aside from the analogy to musical structure which can be seen in these devices, one can also point out that, depending on the way they are emphasized, they also have great comic potential.

A little later, Northrop Frye writes,

We tend to forget how operatic the Elizabethan theatre was, with it sennets and tuckets and flourishes, its "mood music" of viols and hautboys, its interspersed songs. We are reminded of this when we study the texts of a dramatist who was interested in the musical backgrounds of his plays and gave full directions for them. John Marston was such a dramatist; in a scene from Sophonisba (1606), which is probably earlier than Shakespeare's Pericles, we have directions such as "organs, viols, and voices play for this act,"  "infernal music plays softly,"  "treble viol and a bass lute play softly within the canopy,"  and "a short song to soft music above."

Without having the actual scores, of course, it is hard to know what such musical effects were actually like. But it seems to me plausible to see an analogy with the role music plays as part of a modern film. It is seldom that a film, without including any actual singing, becomes as operatic as Oliver Stone's Platoon, and in fact the oft stated platitude is that a film score fails if the audience is consciously aware of it, but if scholars in some future century wind up needing to study the movies of our time only on the basis of the screenplays, or even as they are but without the soundtracks, they will certainly have a hard time understanding the impact the film was intended to have.

Soliloquies and Quotable Lines

I think that the main thing that makes it difficult for us to understand the way that soliloquies and other set speeches functioned in Shakespearean theatre is the very different attitude that Elizabethans had toward verse. Whereas in a modern performance verse is almost an embarrassment, something one must be careful not to overemphasize, for the Elizabethans poetry was a passion which I think must have been somewhat comparable to the contemporary passion for popular music. I think that a sizable proportion of Shakespeare's public would have been just as knowledgeable about poetry as many today are about rock guitarists, keyboardists, singers, and drummers. One can be fairly sure, in any case, that Shakespeare did not put his soliloquies and other set speeches into his plays to satisfy his own vanity. Far from being an interruption to the flow of the story, these were the highlights of the performance. These were undoubtedly the moments when the audience stopped talking and really paid attention. It was to some extent as if the story was merely a supporting structure for the set speeches (although not to the extent that the story in an opera is a supporting structure for the arias).

Contemporary performances of Shakespeare often try and incorporate the soliloquy into the flow of the story, seeing a soliloquy as a convention by which we are able to overhear a character's inner thoughts. This often doesn't work very well. Film versions where the camera focuses on the actor's face while the soliloquy is spoken as a muttered voiceover are especially disastrous, turning a speech that was clearly intended as one of the highlights of the play into a sort of footnote.

In their series of television programs on the performance of Shakespeare, The Royal Shakespeare Society makes the point that soliloquies always are most effective when spoken to the audience, not when the actor speaks to himself. Schüking in 1919 wrote that a Shakespearean soliloquy is "a monologue in which the actor, so to speak, fraternizes with the audience."

According to J.L. Styan ("Stage Space and the Shakespeare Experience," printed in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Thompson and Thompson),

"Soliloquy" is a late 17^th or 18^th century literary concept (thus about a hundred years after Shakespeare), and `speaking to oneself' was not a device that Shakespeare or the Elizabethan stage would have recognized. However addressing the audience was a normal and constant activity. It was a convention by which an actor gave himself completely to the house, putting him in direct contact with the spectators; it was the primary device to encourage sharing. Alone on the great platform, a solitary figure made a powerful statement to the spectator, one not so much about the character's state of mind (the lines would do that), but about the actor's need to reach out to his audience with intimacy and immediacy.

The Shakespearean speeches now commonly referred to as soliloquies are thus awkward in the sort of performance which aims at creating the illusion of overheard conversation and tries to maintain an esthetic distance between the performers and the audience. A Shakespearean "soliloquy" is then an interruption to the flow of the play, a disturbing break in the "fourth wall" of the performance space.

Another reason for not trying to treat a soliloquy as a natural part of the narrative flow is that soliloquies and set speeches are usually marked out stylistically as something apart from the rest of the play. Although the style of a set speech is (at least ideally) in character for the speaker, it's not actually something that the character would have naturally spoken or even thought. For instance, although the "To thine own self be true" speech certainly sounds exactly like Polonius, from a naturalistic point of view it's not really credible that Polonius would have made this speech as an entirety to his son. (Of course an actor can help in this respect by using various stage mannerisms: pacing back and forth, scratching his head, etc. to give the impression that the character is thinking. This weakens the speech, in my opinion, but does make it more natural.)

In a film, a voiceover is a natural choice for a soliloquy. And certainly voiceovers in films can sometimes be extremely effective. One particular example that comes to mind is the Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. But in all the movies I can think of where voiceovers really work, the voiceover is directed to the audience and is "a device for bonding the character and the audience," (as Ralph Berry writes in "Hamlet and the Audience: the Dynamics of a Relationship," reprinted in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Thompson and Thompson).

And the voiceovers in most movies are not a very good analogy to soliloquies in Shakespeare. In all the movies I can think of (aside from Shakespearean ones), a voiceover functions as a part of the narrative. It tells the audience about those parts of the story which, for whatever reason, the screenwriter and director have not chosen to dramatize. Furthermore, the voiceover, as a disembodied voice coming from nowhere, is an alien element in a cinematic drama, and it takes a little effort to teach the audience to accept it as part of the movie. Usually this is done by establishing the voiceover as one of the conventions of a film from close to the very beginning.

If I were doing a Shakespearean film and using voiceovers for soliloquies, I think I would want to rearrange the text so that the voiceovers occurred between scenes, accompanied by corresponding interesting visual material. In Hamlet, I might consider using the "To be or not to be" soliloquy as a prologue to the entire play.

In light of the quote by Richard David above, I think it is not unreasonable to think of the set speeches in Shakespeare's plays as being comparable to the arias in an opera or the songs in a musical comedy. However one must always remember that a Shakespearean play, much more than a contemporary play, is a drama of words. As pointed out by John Barton in the Royal Shakespeare Company television series, in Shakespeare, the real power is in the text, not in the actor's performance. The sort of intense emotional expression often common in modern acting, when used in Shakespeare can easily overpower the words. This will weaken, not strengthen, the performance. (Shakespeare's advice to the players which he wrote for Hamlet stresses clear delivery of the text and says nothing about emotions.)

Now consider the way in which a song in a musical comedy relates to the character who is singing it. (I have to admit that opera is not something I can speak very knowledgeably about.) The song, at least ideally, needs to be perfectly in character for the personality of the character singing it. And yet, even if the world were such that people did suddenly break into song, the song is not usually something which this particular character would be capable of singing. First of all, far from being the spontaneous burst of emotion which it pretends to be, the song is a carefully crafted work that represents a great deal of effort from its composer and lyricist. And secondly, a song in a musical comedy is usually often far more articulate and intelligent than the character singing it would be capable of being.

In My Fair Lady, for instance, when Liza Doolittle's father Alf sings "I'm Getting Married in the Morning," or "With a Little Bit of Luck," we say to ourselves, "Yes, that's Alf Doolittle, all right. That's exactly who he is." And yet, paradoxically enough, Alf Doolittle would never have been capable of expressing who he is as articulately and as intelligently as the song does.

And one can say the same thing for Liza Doolittle's song, "Just You Wait, Henry Higgins," or Professor Higgins's song, "Why Can't a Woman Be Like a Man?" although the discrepancy is a little less conspicuous in these cases.

The trick is, I believe, that the individual lines of the song are things the character in question could well have said, but the way these lines have been assembled into a coherent whole is beyond what one could reasonably have expected from the character.

If we think of Shakespeare's plays as being like sitcoms, especially older sitcoms and like the old vaudeville-like radio and television comedy hours, then soliloquies are a more natural element. In fact, I think that the best modern analogue to the Shakespearean soliloquy is the comic monologue, even when the soliloquy is not comic.

For instance, the "Seven Ages of Man" monologue in As You Like It is in content (although not in style) something that a modern comic such as Bill Cosby might deliver.

If we re-write this to suit Bill Cosby's rhythm, it might go something like the following:

You know, the whole world's nothing but one big stage,
And us? Hey, we're the actors, that's all.
We all have our entrances and our exits,
And in our lifetime, any one of us plays a lot of different parts.
Unless we die too soon, we all get seven acts.
Seven ages in a lifetime, that's our seven acts.
In Act 1, we're the baby, crying in our mamma's arms.
And then Act 2 comes along and we're off to school,
With shining faces and whining voices, creeping like
A snail, 'cause we don't even want to go there in the first place.
Etc.

Okay, so maybe this is a sacrilege, rewriting Shakespeare in contemporary language. But the point is that a good Shakespearean actor, who also understands comedy, can make this just as entertaining as Bill Cosby, whereas if an actor delivers this speech in a way that makes it into a sermon rather than a piece of entertainment, I personally consider that a travesty of Shakespeare. (And it makes a damned poor sermon, because, like so many comic monologues, all it does is to state the obvious in a clever way.)

Ejner Jensen in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy comments on this monologue:

Jaques's speech, however laden with commonplaces, is a brilliant theatre piece. No actor charged with its delivery has ever wished it shorter, and even the most jaded theatergoer must have some curiosity about how this actor in this production is going to bring the speech to life. The speech is a perennially fascinating performative moment in productions of the play.

To me, this says that Jaques's monologue functions the same way as a comic monologue in a sitcom or an aria in an opera or a song in a musical comedy. There is only the most minimal pretense made that the monologue is part of the narrative flow of the drama. And I believe, on the basis of the texts themselves, that this was true of all of Shakespeare's set pieces and soliloquies as originally performed.

Another issue for modern Shakespearean actors is what to do with those lines which have become for us famous quotations. "Frailty, thy name is woman."    "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."    "What fools these mortals be!"    "The play's the thing / To catch the conscience of the king."

There's a tendency for many actors to be somewhat embarrassed to be speaking lines like this, to try to introduce some change into their delivery to prevent these lines from standing out as if highlighted. I've even seen modern actors try to bury such lines in the rest of the dialogue, speaking them more quickly or more quietly than the rest.

I believe that Shakespeare intentionally wrote such lines to be highlighted, as a sort of slogans, and that they were in fact one of the things in his plays that especially appealed to audiences. Modern playwrights and especially screenwriters do the same thing. Think of Clint Eastwood's line "Go ahead, make my day!" in Dirty Harry, Bogart's "Here's looking at you, kid," from Casablanca, Mae West's "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" or, from the John Huston film The Treasure of Sierra Madre, "We don't need no stinkin' badges." It would scarcely have made sense for Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, or Mae West to have spoken lines like this in a mutter for fear that they would seem overly theatrical and unrealistic.

Why We Need to Understand Performance

For example in his book on Shakespeare Harold Bloom writes,

Shakespeare's largest tribute to Falstaff is that, belying his own promise to the audience, he dared not allow Sir John to appear on stage in Henry V. The playwright understood the magnitude of his creation. Scholars tend not to, which is why we have the nonsense of what they, and not Shakespeare, continue to call the Henriad.

Bloom refers to Falstaff as Shakespeare's creation, but, at least as concerns the performances of the Chamberlaine's men, he was at least as much Will Kempe's creation as Shakespeare's, and apparently Kempe's improvisational energy in playing Falstaff, although enormously popular with audiences was fairly disruptive to Shakespeare's overall conception of the play. In his book, Stages of Play, Michael Shurgot speculates,

Returning to my earlier point about Kempe playing Falstaff and Burbage playing Hal, we can imagine the theatrical energy of this play as a virtual contest between Kempe and Burbage for on-stage supremacy.... As Falstaff's theatrical energy threatens both the historical basis of Elizabethan authority and its power to control the time of men's lives by ordering when they must die in the service of the state, so Kempe's improvisational energy threatened the ability of the Chamberlain's men to perform a "script" with even moderate predictability....

Indeed, in creating Falstaff, Shakespeare may have created more disruptive theatrical energy than even his own highly professional company could contain.

Shurgot suggests that it is plausible to imagine that an acrimony of this sort between Kempe on the one hand and Burbage and Shakespeare on the other is reflected in the advice to the players which Shakespeare later wrote for Hamlet, where he reproaches clowns for improvising. There is no evidence, as far as I know, as to whether an argument over Kempe's improvisations in Falstaff had anything to do with his decision to leave the troupe at the moment of his greatest success with the public. But the point is that one can be led astry if one thinks of Shakespeare simply as a writer and imagines that his choices were all made purely on literary grounds. He was a creator of plays, and producing a script was only one step in that process and had to serve all the other steps as well.

In a somewhat similar way, for a long time critics were puzzled by the two questions of why in King Lear the Fool disappears in Act 5 and why there are no scenes involving Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia in Act  2 through 4. But finally some critic realized that the answer is obvious if one thinks of Lear as a play to be performed rather than as a piece of literature to be read. Clearly what must have been the case was that in Shakespeare's troupe, the actor who played Cordelia also played the Fool. Shakespeare's audience would have been quite aware of this and wouldn't have wondered what had happened to the Fool. But the disappearance presents a problem if one, unlike the Elizabethans, thinks of a play as an attempt at presenting a convincing simulation of reality. (The problem with this theory, though, is imagining an actor who would have been capable of playing both parts. It is usually thought that Shakespeare's new clown, Robert Armin, would have played the Fool. But could he have played Cordelia? My guess is that Robert Armin was not involved in the production of King Lear and that a very talented adolescent boy played both roles.)

As another example, consider one of Albert Bermel's comments on A Midsummer Night's Dream in his book Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies.

At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "mechanicals" (i.e. craftsmen) Bottom, Peter Quince, and company present an extremely amateurishly done and brief performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe." During the performance, the male halves of the two young amorous couples (i.e. Demetrius and Lysander) make malicious wisecracks about it. And the two female halves (Helena and Hermia) have no lines at all. Albert Bermel says, "We are bound to wonder what the silence of Hermia and Helena portends during the 433 lines of Act 5. Perhaps they digest the lesson that their grooms-to-be ignore."

Bermel's comment would be perfectly valid when applied to most contemporary plays, or to a play by Chekhov. But the Shakespearean audience was being shown actors, not the illusion of real people. The actors were standing on a platform and it was up to the audience to imagine the setting they are in. (There was in fact a little scenery, but it was very minimal.) The audience didn't wonder what an actor might be thinking when s/he was on stage and not participating in the action, because for practical purposes at such times s/he didn't exist; s/he was essentially a piece of scenery. And since an actor with no lines to speak serves no useful purpose, my guess is that the adolescent boys playing Hermia and Helena weren't in fact on stage at all during the end of Act 5, but had quietly withdrawn and were changing costumes in order to play fairies in the masque at the end of the play.

Michael W. Shurgot makes essentially the same comment as Bermel's about The MidsummerNight's Dream in his book Stages of Play: Shakespeare's Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance, and then comments analogously on the silence of Jessica (Shylock's daughter) at the end of the last act of The Merchant of Venice.

Jessica's final line in the play is, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." Shurgot hears in this line an echo of Shylock's attitude toward music and festivities in Act 2, Scene 5.

Shylock (to Jessica).  Hear you, Jessica,
Lock up my doors and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife,
Clamber you not up to the casements then.

Jessica is now the outsider.... Indeed, as Ralph Berry notes, no one even speaks to her again for the final 238 lines in Act 5....

Jessica's long silence during the final 238 lines again divides the audience, for those spectators closest to where she stands for the rest of the scene will be more conscious than spectators in other parts of the theatre of her immense long silence and the internal pain that silence may symbolize.

To me this is an example of the wide range of choices Shakespeare gives actors and directors. Certainly it is possible to play the final act of the Merchant in a way that portrays Jessica as an alienated outsider, thus additing a dark tinge to what is otherwise a happy ending (although it is asking a big much of even an modern audience to notice the similarity between Jessica's one-line comment about music in Act 5 and Shylock's remarks in Act 2). But this amounts to the director adding something to the play which is in no way indicated in the original, and thus significantly changing the play.

As so often, Shakespeare shows us interactions (or, in this case, Jessica's silence) but leaves us free to decide what meaning we want to attach to them, even when that meaning is in no respect implied by the text. But I can think of nothing in the texts of any of the plays to suggest that it ever occurred to Shakespeare that his audience would find the silence of one of his characters meaningful, or that the audience would attempt to read the mind of a silent character.

My own guess is that if Shurgot's interpretation had been suggested to Shakespeare, he would have said, "That's something that never occurred to me. But if the audience likes it: fine."

But certainly the idea that the attention of a performance would be focussed, even in part, on a character who is silent (and a minor character at that) is thoroughly modern --- post-Chekhov.

Although there could be no costume change which would necessitate Jessica's withdrawal after her last speech in Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, everything we know about the nature of acting on Shakespeare's stage suggests that once Jessica had ceased to perform her essential function, she would have withdrawn to the back of the stage and made room for the characters who were still involved in the scene.

The curious thing about Shurgot's book is that it is devoted to a discussion of Shakespeare's plays based on conjectures as to how they would have been played on the thrust stage of Shakespeare's time. But the whole discussion is presented under the assumption that the style of acting, and in particular the way in which the play would have been blocked, was completely modern. A big part of Shurgot's comment above (which I have omitted in my quote) concerns Jessica's hypothetical position on stage during Act 5. But in the first place, what we know about the extremely brief rehearsal time Shakespeare's troupe used (about two weeks) makes it highly unlikely that Shakespeare used the carefully planned blocking that Shurgot conjectures. And in fact, it seems very unlikely to me that Shakespeare's characters occupied static positions on stage at all. On the contrary, on a stage which is surrounded by the audience, it is much more likely that characters would usually be constantly moving. My guess is that in the case of the play-within-a-play in the Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, the "mechanicals" performing the play occupied a region more or less in the middle of the stage, but that Demetrius and Lysander wandered back and forth around the edge of the stage and addressed their comments to the audience rather than to each other.

Structure

Entertainment, on the other hand, can come from engaging dialogue, jokes, intriguing characters, absurd situations, interesting ideas, or a number of other things.

In most conventional drama and fiction, the goal is to present an overall unified story which comes to a resolution at the end. The details, which should also be interesting in themselves, all serve to support this overall story. Even in a picaresque novel or film, basically the same pattern holds, except that there is a sequence of stories instead of one.

In modern plays and films (as well as many novels), the writer's number one objective is to control the mood of the audience. The writer manipulates the audience's emotions, most often by taking them through a series of ups and down, until the final emotional impact is established at the end of the drama.

One of the things that I believe distinguishes Shakespearean plays as well as many sitcoms, and perhaps most other comedy as well, from other fiction and drama is that in Shakespeare (and many sitcoms) the primary interest is in the ongoing entertainment rather than the overall story. Shakespeare's approach to story telling seems very different from our modern idea of fiction and drama. And rather than thinking in terms of contemporary, Chekhov-derived drama, I believe that we can better understand what Shakespeare was doing by thinking in terms of many sitcoms and certain comic strips (such as Peanuts) as well as musical comedies and screenplays, especially classical Hollywood screwball comedies.

Shakespearean plays (and sitcoms) certainly have an overall story. But whereas in the usual drama, the dialogue is primarily a vehicle for telling the story, in Shakespeare, as in many sitcoms (as well as a lot of film comedy, such as Abbot & Costello or the Marx Brothers films), the function of the story is primarily to provide an occasion for the characters' speeches, dialogue, and just plain clowning around.

The traditional fictional plot puts the audience or reader into a state of anxiety (suspense) by putting the protagonist into a predicament that he badly needs to get out of. "Put your hero up a tree and then have people throw stones at him," is the way some writing courses describe this. This is what the Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado About Nothing is like, as well as the Antonio-Shylock-Portia plot in the Merchant of Venice, at least if Portia's impersonation in the courtroom scene is played seriously, and that's one of the things that makes the Merchant seem like it's not really a comedy.

A reader or audience will be very frustrated if forced to leave a story like this before the ending, and the impact of a traditional contemporary non-comic story is often considerably diminished if the reader or member of the audience is previously given a "spoiler," which reveals significant plot developments.

But for the usual Shakespearean comedy or a sitcom, the entertainment comes from the predicament itself. The suspense is minimal. Rather than wanting to see the protagonist rescue himself or be saved from the predicament, the audience wants the predicament to continue as long as possible. This is why audiences don't get frustrated at Rosalind in As You Like It for continuing to disguise herself long after there's any compelling need for the disguise. For Shakespearean comedies (and to a great extent, I think for many of the histories and tragedies as well), a "spoiler" won't ruin the audience's pleasure at all, and someone forced to leave before the ending will be only mildly annoyed.

In Shakespeare's plays the story was painted, as it were, with a broad brush. The method of story telling was not to present small clues which the audience was expected to piece together. Chekhov's famous statement, "If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, then you must fire it off in the last act" would have made no sense to Shakespeare, because by the last act, most of his audience would have forgotten Act 1.

The Frye Paradigm and the Grote Complaint

In his book on sitcoms, The End of Comedy. Grote makes the following assertion.

If we are to understand the revolutionary nature of the form of the situation comedy, we must examine the form as it uses both kinds of situation: the situation of the individual episode and the situation of the series as a whole. When both are considered, it becomes obvious that the sit-com is like no other form of literature and shares almost nothing with what we have always known as comedy.

But in fact, Grote is mistaken in looking at sitcoms and other comedies primarily in terms of structure. Is it the nature of the plots that keeps people watching Seinfeld, or Cheers, or All in the Family, or Lucy? Although it's certainly reasonable to complain about the quality of most sitcoms, Grote's claim that the sitcom "shares almost nothing with what we have always known as comedy" is, at the very least, highly overstated. In fact, sitcoms and more traditional comedies both make people laugh, and for pretty much the same reasons.

Grote begins his book by a general survey of comedy throughout literary history. Setting aside the comedy of Aristophanes, which one might characterize as satirical burlesque (and which, despite what Grote says, one still does find today), he sees the defining characteristics of dramatic comedy to be an attack on authority and respectability, especially by ridicule, and a plot described by Northrope Frye in his book The Anatomy of Criticism which is very similar to the traditional Hollywood formula known as Boy Gets Girl. Grote summarizes Frye's plot as follows:

What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is thwarted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will.

An interesting about this is that, even allowing for variations in the plot (for instance the hero might be a young woman who wants a certain man rather than vice versa), almost none of Shakespeare's comedies fit the Northrope Frye paradigm very well, except that they do conclude (sometimes rather implausibly) in marriages. In his eagerness to cram everything into Frye's paradigm, Grote has to look at the Tempest as the story of Ferdinand and Miranda, and (a little less drastically) The Merchant of Venice as the story of Bassanio and Portia. Basically Grote finds the Frye paradigm almost anytime a play contains a man and a woman and they eventually get married.

In As You Like It, there is indeed an obstacle to Rosalind and Orlando getting together, namely the fact that Rosalind has disguised herself as a man. But the play does not focus on attempts to circumvent this obstacle. In fact, once the lovers have escaped to the Forest of Arden, there is no good reason at all why Rosalind should not simply reveal herself to Orlando. The audience, though, almost never notices this because the play does not focus on this obstacle.

In Much Ado About Nothing, the Beatrice-Benedick plot does not fit Frye's paradigm at all. It is, however, a plot that could work in a sitcom very easily, with one modification. Since the basic situation in a sitcom cannot change, Beatrice and Benedick could not both be part of the core group of characters in the sitcom. Either they would both have to be outside characters who are somehow connected to the core group (friends, relatives, whatever), or one of them belongs to the core group and another would be an outsider. But in this second case, the outcome could not be marriage. Instead, something would go wrong and the character in the core group would be left back in his traditional lonely situation.

The Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado, on the other hand, does fit the Frye paradigm. But it's not comic.

The first half of The Merchant of Venice vaguely fits the Frye paradigm, since Bassanio does manage to marry Portia. But doing this involves overcoming only two obstacles, and neither causes him much trouble: first, he needs to borrow the requisite money from Antonio, and second he needs to choose the right casket after he meets Portia. And furthermore, the plot here, like so many of Shakespeare's plots is full of holes. It's clear that Bassanio has decided to marry Portia without even having met her, primarily on the grounds that she is wealthy, and yet we accept them as a couple totally in love. Furthermore, since winning Portia would depend only on making the proper choice in the casket game, Bassanio was essentially using Antonio's money for a gamble, and there was thus a fair possibility that he would never be able to pay Antonio back, contrary to what he told Antonio. And finally, if all that mattered was his choosing the right casket, then what was the point of borrowing money in order to be able to dress up and otherwise impress Portia?

Shakespeare apparently knew that these glitches in the plot logic wouldn't be noticed by his audience. And in fact, we seldom notice them today.

The second half of the Merchant, however, doesn't fit the Frye paradigm in any conceivable way. (Which is perhaps one reason why The Merchant of Venice is usually not classed among Shakespeare's "romantic comedies.") But the basic plot is perfect sitcom material. The good friend of a woman's husband is in legal jeopardy. So the wife and her best friend (Lucy and Ethel, say) disguise themselves as males and learned lawyers and go into court where the wife successfully defends her husband's friend. Then, as a token of appreciation, the two disguised women ask their unsuspecting husbands for the keepsakes which their spouses had vowed to always hold as a symbol of their marriages. When the men get home, the two women, now out of disguise, berate their husbands for having relinquished the keepsakes, until finally, when they've had enough of the joke, the reveal the impersonation and the episode ends with everyone happy. (Again, the plot doesn't really hold water. Because the fact of the impersonation doesn't change the husbands' guilt in having given away what was supposed to be a sacred symbols of their marriages.)

Only in the world of sitcoms (or Shakespeare comedies) can a plot like this have any plausibility.

In Twelfth Night, the Viola-Orsino-Olivia plot fits the Frye paradigm reasonably well, except that Shakespeare should have provided Viola with a more compelling motive for not revealing her identity. But ta great deal of the play is devoted to the Malvolio plot (which could also be used as good sitcom material). And this, along with the Belch-Aguecheek plot, are completely tangential to the Viola-Orsino-Olivia story. And I think that in this respect one sees the essential point: in writing his comedies, Shakespeare was not primarily interested in following any particular plot format. He was willing to throw in just about anything but the kitchen sink, provided only that he could create funny situations from it.

The Shakespeare comedies which seem to me to really fit the Northrope Frye paradigm are The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona (with a reversal in that the woman is the protagonist), The Midsummer Night's Dream, and All's Well That End's Well (again with a woman protagonist). Basically, Love's Labours Lost almost fits the paradigm, except that at the end Shakespeare aborts the plot so that the marriages never come off. I for one consider Love's Labours Lost a failed comedy, partly for this reason but also because, unlike any other Shakespearean comedy, the romantic spotlight is on men rather than women. To me, romantic comedy is basically a woman's comedy (somewhat like what we now call a "date flick"), despite the fact that many males may enjoy it.

As far as the plot goes, Shakespeare realized that his audience would be perfectly happy as long as the couples wound up married at the end, even if the marriages didn't make much sense. (Olivia in Twelfth Night is perfectly willing to be married to Sebastian, for no reason other than that he looks like Viola.)

The resolution of the problems posed by the plots is an important comic element of a Shakespearean play, but basically it was just the crowning joke of the play, no more important than the various comic moments that had precede it. And one often sees the same thing in sitcoms. Of course we are curious as to how Lucy will finally be extricated from the predicament she's got herself into, but the real point of the episode is the various hilarious situations that occur on the way to the final resolution.

And in some cases, when Shakespeare gets to the end of his play, he simply lets some of the essential plot problems dissipate rather than providing satisfactory resolutions. Portia turns out to have information (where on earth did she get it?) indicating that the ships carrying Antonio's fortunes at sea have not been lost after all. The usurping Duke and Orlando's brother, who caused Rosalind and Celia (among others in As You Like It) to flee to the Forest of Arden in fear of their lives, simply have a change of heart. And Isabella, who in Measure for Measure was willing to see her brother be killed rather than give up her virginity, is suddenly perfectly agreeable to marrying the Duke. (Some critics have gone so far as to create a new ending for Measure for Measure in which Isabella refuses to marry the Duke, seizing upon the fact that in the text, Isabella never explicitly says that she's willing.)

Harold Bloom, in reference to number of improbabilities of this sort, refers to Measure for Measure as "this unbelievable yet persuasive drama."

The same sort of thing sometimes happens in sitcoms. (Sam: "So whatever happened to that guy who kept threatening to beat you up if you didn't pay him all that money?"   Joe: "Oh, he got run over by a truck." Aside from the names of the characters, doesn't this sound vaguely like Seinfeld?)

It's not that the world of Shakespearean comedy (or sitcoms) is without logic. It's not at all true that any turn in the plot whatsoever would be acceptable. We would never be able to accept it if Portia were to save Antonio's life by offering to marry Shylock in exchange. That wouldn't make any sense. And within the world of Shakespearean comedies (and sitcoms), things do actually make sense. It's only when we try applying the logic of realistic drama that things seem illogical.

Finally, in contrast to the classic critical paradigm of comedy, Shakespeare's comedies seldom attack authority or ridicule it. Falstaff and Hamlet are Shakespeare's most important anti-authority figures, but they don't actually attack authority in traditional comedic fashion. (Perhaps Hamlet comes close, in his dialogue with Polonius.) In Much Ado About Nothing, the constable Dogberry is certainly a ridiculous figure, but the real authority figure in the play, Don Pedro, is not at all ridiculous, and furthermore is generally helpful to the two pairs of lovers rather than being an obstacle.

Thematic Values

This makes the critical literature on Shakespeare rather fascinating, because it spans four centuries (but primarily the last two) during which societal values have changed considerably. It is interesting to see critics try and reconcile what's in Shakespeare's plays with values which Shakespeare was probably only vaguely aware of, if at all. A critic whose values are not in accord with those affirmed by the play has the choice, on the one hand, of condemning the play. This is what Harold Bloom does with the Merchant of Venice, even going so far as to conjecture that Shakespeare probably regretted writing it. On the other hand, the more common approach is to find a way of reinterpreting the play, even to the point of distortion, so that it confirms the critic's values. Thus Bloom reinterprets The Taming of the Shrew so that instead of affirming the value that women need to be submissive to their husbands, it instead asserts that women can use the guise of submission to achieve true dominance.

In general, the audience wants to see good guys win and bad guys lose. But it also affirms the audience's values when, as in the case of tragedies, a good guy loses when he transgresses some generally accepted societal rule. Most people in the world live by society's rules, because they don't see any other choice available to them, and they want to see it affirmed that this is the best way to live. For instance Macbeth, in my opinion, affirms the principle that one should not grasp for more in life than one is naturally entitled to. Othello affirms the principle that one should have absolute trust in a spouse who gives you her love. Romeo & Juliet affirms the principle that hatred between families in an evil that can destroy even the purest and most innocent. Hamlet... Well, any comment on Hamlet is bound to be controversial, but in my opinion Hamlet affirms that even though fighting evil may the correct thing to do, when evil is powerful then one will wind up being destroyed by it.

The values affirmed by sitcoms are almost always quite simplistic, which is one of the reasons (although probably not the main one) that people despise sitcoms. The values affirmed by Shakespeare's comedies are for the most part simplistic in the same way. The comedies affirm, for instance, that people in love ought to be able to marry. Much Ado About Nothing affirms that love is one of the highest ideals and one should not reject it.

Today we problems with several of Shakespeare's comedies because we have values which the comedies seem to disregard or even conflict with. We have a value, for instance, which asserts that people should get married on the basis of compatibility rather than attraction, and so we are bothered by the question of whether several of the couples who get married at the end of Shakespeare's comedies will ever be happy together. And we are especially bothered by cases such as in All's Well That Ends Well in which one of the partners is married against his will. Many of us have values which cause us to judge Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, or Porta's treatment of her unsuccessful suitors, as being cruel.

Shakespeare As Literature

Important as it is to remember that Shakespeare in the entertainment business, we also need to be aware that he was both a dramatist and a poet. Although he didn't think of his primary function in writing plays as to produce poetry, nonetheless it is clear that this is where he put a lot of his energy. (Of course he lived in a world where poetry was appreciated, and good poetry was an asset to his plays, not a liability.)

Dr. Samuel Johnson, a little more than a century after Shakespeare's time, wrote, "Only a blockhead would write except to make money." In the Elizabethan era, the idea that literature could be a means of making money would have been considered bizarre. So Shakespeare used his talents not to write literature (as the Elizabethans would have understood it) but to produce entertainments. It was vital for Shakespeare to never forget that the number one criterion for his writing was that it be enjoyable by his audience. Many writers write to impress, but Shakespeare wrote to entertain.

In a slightly different way than Samuel Johnson, Northrop Frye in A Natural Perspective says,

It is consistent with Shakespeare's perfect objectivity that he should show no signs of wanting to improve his audience's tastes, or to address the more instructed members of it with a particular intimacy. His chief motive in writing, apparently, was to make money, which is the best motive for writing yet discovered, as it creates exactly the right blend of detachment and concern. He seems to start out with an almost emphatic relationship to his audience: their assumptions about patriotism and sovereignty, their clichés about Frenchmen and Jews, their notions of what constitutes a joke, seem to be acceptable to him as dramatic postulates.... He never seems to have addressed his audience with any other attitude than that expressed in the last line of Twelfth Night: "We'll strive to please you every day."

I love Northrop Frye (as I suppose most people do), because he states the common-sense things that I myself believe, but manages to express them much more persuasively and with much more insight than I could. However I think that here he has not given sufficient emphasis to one point: In order to please an audience, a writer needs to begin by pleasing himself. I believe that what Dr. Johnson said is only half the truth. I don't believe that any writer can write quickly and also write well, as Shakespeare did, unless he unless he gets satisfaction out of the writing process for its own sake.

I don't mean to exclude the possibility that certain stages in the writing process were torture for Shakespeare. For all we know, maybe it was torture for him producing the first draft of a script (although the speed at which he wrote makes this unlikely). Or maybe he hated the revision process. But it is quite clear to me, simply by looking at the texts themselves, that there was a certain stage in the process of producing a script where Shakespeare started having an enormous amount of fun with what he was writing. He would allow himself to take off in a certain direction that had nothing to do with his original game plan and find himself just riffing on a certain character or a certain situation.

This seems to have happened to him for the first time in Two Gentlemen of Verona. In this otherwise rather dreadful comedy (at least in terms of its overall plot and characters), suddenly we get a minor character, an ignorant bumpkin named Launce, who suddenly goes into a long rambling speech about his ill-behaved dog and all the problems this dog has caused him. This speech, which one can find quoted in Bloom's book, has no real connection to the plot. Indeed Harold Bloom writes, "Launce is so hearteningly a person, or rather person-with-a-dog, that I wonder why he is wasted upon Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is not at all good enough for him." (A writing workshop, on the other hand, would probably have told Shakespeare that including Launce's dialogue was simply self-indulgent on his part.) But this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to writers who have fun writing. They get carried away with their enthusiasm for what they're writing at the moment and momentarily forget about the overall structure of the work.

In reading Shakespeare's texts, or watching them performed, I see this happening over and over again. It is especially known for the case of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (where Shakespeare reported stated that he had to kill Mercutio off in order to prevent him from destroying the play), Falstaff, and, in my opinion, Hamlet.

In my opinion, we can also see this in Shakespeare's most poetic passages, the ones that have turned into famous quotations, and especially in many of the soliloquies. It is certainly entirely possible that as Shakespeare wrote such lines as "What fools these mortals be," he was thinking, "This is just the sort of thing that audiences love;" I think one can see from the texts that what moved him to write was the anticipation of the response his words would evoke in the theatre. But I believe that it is impossible for a writer to write things like this unless he finds pure joy in them.

Because Shakespeare wrote first of all to please himself, there is a great deal more in his plays than what he needed to please his audiences, and there is a great deal that is hard to understand by only watching his plays in performance (just as there is a great deal else that's hard to understand without seeing them in performance).

There is no way of knowing whether Shakespeare, if he had lived in the Nineteenth Century, might have been a successful novelist. I myself don't think he would have.. For one thing, I believe Shakespeare did not have a talent for was creating stories. Instead he based almost all his plays on pre-existing stories, and often he was rather clumsy in the way he adapted the plots. But what he did have a talent for was taking a story and bringing it to life and peopling it with wonderful characters.

It was only after Shakespeare's death, when quality editions of his plays (the folio editions) were published by his friends and when people started paying attention to the actual words in his plays rather than the performances he produced, that he started to gain recognition as a writer.

Certainly for us in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, getting to know Shakespeare by seeing the plays performed presents considerable difficulties of its own. The Shakespearean language in difficult to understand without the benefit of a multitude of footnotes. One may be able to follow the general gist of what is happening on stage, but few people can manage to understand every word. And in Shakespeare, after all, it's really the words that make it all worthwhile.

One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he can be accessible in all sorts of different ways that all work. Shakespeare can work very well in a modern performance or a film or when read silently or when studied in a classroom or by a critic. It certainly doesn't make any sense to say that people who find value in Shakespeare in one of these forms are wrong. And there is certainly ample substance in the plays to reward those who study them closely.