Benjamin McEvoy

Essays on writing, reading, and life

Shakespeare’s Comedies and Tragedies

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The compilation of Shakespeare’s First Folio, in 1623, had the plays divided into the generic labels of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Since then, the plays have been considered generically in relation to the category that was first imposed upon them.

But Shakespeare’s plays are not static enough in their conventions as to be completely tragic, comic, or historical. Attempts to establish a single label for these plays is to do them a disservice.

The rudimentary mode of distinguishing between Shakespearean tragedy and Shakespearean comedy is often an observance of whether the play in question ends in marriage or death. This is true but, aside from the difference in endings, the techniques and conventions used within both genres are often the same but put to a different purpose.

Shakespeare subverts expectations of comedy and tragedy by exploiting the conventions of each play’s generic opposite. Because of this, there are aspects of Shakespearean tragedy in which the audience feels like it is watching a comedy, and vice versa.

Sometimes structural elements of a comedy are almost completely similar to structural elements of a tragedy, and either genre has the ability to become, over the course of its length, its antithesis.

Othello vs A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Structurally, the beginnings of Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are almost identical.

When considered in juxtaposition with one another there is a sense of discordance among the generic divisions. Observance of the similar structures would imply that the genres of comedy and tragedy are not completely mutually exclusive, and that there is room for mutability.

The comedy begins with a father’s ‘complaint’ (I. i. 22) of his daughter. Egeus informs the Duke that Lysander has ‘bewitch’d’ (27) his daughter, which anticipates Brabantio’s complaint to the Duke concerning his daughter. According to him, Othello had her ‘corrupted | By spells and medicines’ (I. iii. 61-2) and ‘witchcraft’ (65).

Shakespeare was likely aware of the plays’ similarities. It is thought that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written approximately a decade before Othello; perhaps he used to the opening structure of the latter in order to subvert ideas of genre.

Expectations of comedy, through use of structural irony, are raised in the audience only to be corrupted into a steady awareness that what they are experiencing is, in fact, a tragedy. It could be inferred that the advice given in the comedy is the same as the advice given in the love-tragedy:

‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream; I. i. 134).

The advice doesn’t change in both plays, it is the narrative trajectory that changes dramatically.

The difference in structure between these two plays’ beginnings is that the tragedy appears to resolve this problem immediately, whilst the comedy delays the resolution until the end. This is where the idea of endings dictating genre is most significant.

Tragedy seems to be more effective in reaching its unhappy conclusion from a trajectory that is in a steady decline, whilst comedy is more perceptible as comedy if it rises to its happy conclusion from a position that is problematic for the protagonists.

The formula for comedy can be seen in Helena’s address to Demetrius:

‘I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of a hell’ (II. i. 243).

The tragedy of Othello is essentially the opposite to this.

At any time the comedy has the potential to develop into a tragedy.

Lysander tells Hermia that his wish is to ‘end life when I end loyalty’ (II. ii. 63).

This line evokes a similar sentiment delivered by Othello to Iago:

‘Excellent wretch! perdition catch my soul | But I do love thee! and when I love thee not | Chaos is come again’ (III. Iii. 90-2).

The difference between the two plays is that when chaos is come in Othello it is realised through violence, deceit, and death. When chaos comes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it comes in the form of farce, misunderstanding, and jokes.

Comedy, tragedy, and didacticism 

The aim of both Shakespearean tragedy and comedy seems to be one, albeit subservient to entertainment, of didacticism.

Quince’s prologue to the play-within-a-play, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expounds this idea in a direct address to the fictional audience, and a covert address to the real audience:

‘by their show, | You shall know all, that you are like to know’ (V. i. 116-7)

The convention of a play-within-a-play is one exploited in both comedy and tragedy in order to approximate and comment on ideas of knowledge. Can one have empirical evidence of anything?

The idea of questioning one’s source of knowledge is explored when Pyramus, faced with the possibility for communication only through a chink in the wall, says:

‘I see a voice! […] I can hear my Thisby’s face’ (V. i. 192-3).

This is an idea that is arrived at during the course of the play, when Bottom questions the reality of his dream experience:

‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (IV. i. 211-14).

This same idea is alluded to in the play-within-a-play of Hamlet. Hamlet, in order to ‘catch the conscience of the king’ (II. ii. 605), arranges two separate plays to be performed; one of sight and one of sound.

The seperation of the two can act as a metaphor than can be abstracted from its context in the play and applied to the idea of possessing ‘ocular proof’ (III. iii. 363) in Othello.

If only Othello had the privelage of witnessing such didactic plays in his own universe; he may have taken the advice alluded to in order to question the source of his knowledge and the outcome of the play could have been altered significantly enough so as to be categorised as a comedy.

Ultimately, however, although the convention of a play-within-a-play is the same in both the tragedy of Hamlet and the comedy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the purpose to which they are put differs. One aims to provide impetus for Hamlet’s tragic conclusion, whilst the other is almost a summary of what the real audience has learnt in watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

There is often a tension in Shakespearean tragedy in which the protagonists are close to achieving the conditions which govern a comedy.

Comedy, tragedy, and returning to nature

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the strongest evocation of the idea that Shakespearean tragedy, like the Attic drama that came long before it, is attempting to reconcile itself to a ritualistic function, expressing fertility and life.

The comic genre has its root in past traditions which yearn for a return to nature, a return to a halcyonic, arcadian, edenic state.

Parallels with Shakespeare’s comedy and Dikaiopolis’ words, in Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, can be drawn:

‘Oh, Athens, Athens, what are you coming to? … I’m gazing at the countryside over yonder … cursing the city and yearning to get back to my village’.

In Shakespeare’s comedy, the events pertain to the ritualistic; it is as if the moon governs the entire play. Theseus instructs Hermia, at the beginning, to reflect within a month’s period and come to a conclusion ‘by the next new moon’ (I. i. 83). From the beginning to the end, with the pervasiveness of the moon as a motif, it is suggested that everything that unfolds does so beneath the control of an omniscient astrological force.

Dissatisfied in their city-dwelling, the protagonists must return to nature, ‘for want of rain’ (I. i. 132), in order to be given new life. There, in the forest, they will be revitalised and ‘wode within this wood’ (II. i. 191).

Comedy is a narrative of life not death.

The struggle that can be seen in a tragedy such as King Lear is the frustrated attempt to return to nature.

Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, makes the crucial suggestion that the lines between comedy and tragedy are unclear when he asks, ‘What is Pyramus? a lover, or a tyrant?’ (I. ii. 22), and then proceeds to sing of the ‘raging rocks’ (31).

The frustration of Lear, and significantly the arrival at his anagnorisis, is born out of a deep instinct to connect with nature.

On the heath, where he derobes in an act symbolic of reducing oneself to basest foundations, he implores the heavens:

‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! | You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout | ‘Till you have drenched our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’ (III. ii. 1-3).

Lear is imploring nature to fertilise him.

The tragedy is that what seems to be a death-instinct, a desire to be drowned, is actually a deep need to be reborn.

What is tragic, furthermore, is that often in the universe of Shakespearean tragedy, the gods that govern the protagonists’ lives are beyond the remit of the protagonists’ invocations. The gods, as a motif, are present in tragedy in as much as they are in comedy. Paradoxically, however, they are present only through their absence.

Comedy, tragedy, and the gods

Tragic heroes recall the sentiment expressed in Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet; they ‘trouble deaf heaven’ with their ‘bootless cries’ (3).

If the gods are present in Shakespearean tragedy, they are deaf.

Pompey, in Antony and Cleopatra, states that if ‘the great gods be just, they shall assist | The deeds of justest men’ (II. i. 616-7). The fact that the gods do not assist either suggests them to be unjust or the protagonists to be unjust; in either case, the result is the same and the gods are deaf.

This sentiment recalls that of Gloucester’s evocation of gods who are not deaf, but actively cruel, in King Lear:

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, | They kill us for their sport’ (IV. i. 36-7).

Rather than being actively cruel, G. Wilson Knight believes the use of language in Othello suggests a complete absence of gods.

The seperation of heavenly bodies from the earth is implicit in statements by Othello, such as:

‘It is the very error of the moon, | She comes more nearer earth than she was wont | And makes men mad’ (V. ii. 107-9).

The heavenly bodies, thrown in contrast like this with man, are shown to ‘remain vast, distant, separate, seen but not apprehended’.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream displays a complete contrast to this. The gods are figured as a motif but are very much present. The gods share the same troubles as mortals, governed by the ‘moonlight’ (II. i. 60), connecting with the mortals, and even displacing themselves in the universe’s hierarchy, exclaiming ‘Hail, mortal’ (III. ii. 175), as if elevating the mortals to godly status.

In isolating just a few motifs that recur in both comedies and tragedies, it is difficult to conclude that the genres are opposites of one another. A more suitable word for ‘opposite’ may be ‘counterpart’, as each genre has the possibility to become the other; it’s difference comes through an application of the same motifs in order to achieve a different outcome.

Comedy and tragedy are not mutually exclusive, but rather like two slightly different tributaries that extend from the same mouth.

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