Today I’d like to take up Robert McCrum’s suggestion and celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, not by indulging in silly conspiracy theories, but by considering his work. Here I turn over some thoughts found in Northrop Frye’s essay, “The Argument of Comedy.”
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not the old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam;
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
“This is no flattery”; these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
When Shakespeare began to write there were several traditions of comedy permeating the literature of Elizabethan England. The dominant form was the so-called “New Comedy” which had its origins in Menander, flourished in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, and achieved new forms in the English vernacular in Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist. Though Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced by New Comedy, the main theme of which, as critic Northrop Frye observes, “is the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice,” another and older pattern of comedic argument had an even more profound influence upon him. This was a tradition “established by Peele and developed by Lyly, Greene, and the masque writers, which uses themes from romance and folk-lore and avoids the comedy of manners.”
The themes of this older comic pattern, Frye continues,
“are largely medieval in origin, and derive, not from the Mysteries or the Moralities or the interludes, but from a fourth dramatic tradition. This is the drama of folk ritual, of the St. George play and the mummers’ play, of the feast of the ass and the Boy Bishop, and of all the dramatic activity that punctuated the Christian calendar with the rituals of the immemorial paganism. We may call this the drama of the green world, and its theme is once again the triumph of life over the waste land, the death and revival of the year impersonated by figures still human and once divine as well.”
G.K. Chesterton once remarked that Shakespeare would have been much better understood by Dante than he was by Goethe, meaning that Shakespeare was in his sensibilities closer to the medieval mind than to the modern. And nowhere do we find the truth of this opinion more evident than in Shakespeare’s development of the dramatic logic of the green world.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to take one of Frye’s examples, is an orthodox New Comedy except for one thing: “The hero Valentine becomes captain of a band of outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters are gathered into this forest and become converted.” The green world of this forest serves as a place of metamorphosis, the natural laboratory of moral transformation in which the comic resolution of the play is concocted.
Similar green worlds are found in “the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the pastoral world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale.” Frye’s point is that in all these plays we see a pattern of movement out of the normal world, an adventure in a green world, and a return, finally, to the normal world.
Yet the characters return from the green world much changed. The green world enables the characters to “play” without the hindrance of social constrictions, and thus to discover new possibilities of being in the world. The result of which is that a new order is established both in the marital union of the lovers and the political reorganization this union effects.
But the green world is not restricted to those plays that literally involve a forest. “In The Merchant of Venice,” Frye argues, “the two worlds are a little harder to see, yet Venice is clearly not the same world as Portia’s mysterious house in Belmont, where there are caskets teaching that gold and silver are corruptible goods, and from whence proceed the wonderful cosmological harmonies of the fifth act. In The Tempest the entire action takes place in the second world, and the same may be said of Twelfth Night, which, as its title implies, presents a carnival society [Twelfth Night being the Eve of Epiphany and the conclusion of the twelve days of Christmas], not so much a green world as an evergreen one.”
The medieval symbolism of the green world, rooted in the even more ancient pagan ritual pattern of summer’s victory over winter, addresses the death and revival of human beings, which has its paradigm in the Death and Resurrection of Christ.
Do you think our comedies today, whether in books or movies, reflect this tradition of the green world?
If so, then what examples can you give?
If not, then why do you think not?
The following photographs were taken at the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.
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