Thеmе: Humor and satire in W. Shakespeare’s comedies

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THЕMЕ: Humor and satire in W. Shakespeare’s comedies


DОNЕ By : Asadov Jaloliddin
Denau – 2020
CОNTЕNTS
INTRОDUCTIОN………………………………………………..…3
COMEDIES,TRAGEDY IN W.SHAKESPEAR'S NOVELS……………………….4
…………………………..………14
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,TWELW NIGHT……………………17
RЕFЕRЕNCЕS…………………………………….………..………24


Intrоductiоn
Shakespeare play types are categorised as Comedy, History, Roman and Tragedy, with some additional categories proposed over the years.When the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio, was published in 1623, its contents page divided them into three categories: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. The list of Comedies included Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, plays that modern audiences and readers have not found particularly ‘comic’. Also included were two late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, that critics often now classify as ‘Romances’. If we ask ourselves what these four plays have in common with those such as As You Like It or Twelfth Night, which we are used to calling ‘comedies’, the answer gives us a clue to the meaning of ‘comedy’ for many of Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries. All of them end in marriage (or at least betrothal). Shakespeare comedies (or rather the plays of Shakespeare that are usually categorised as comedies) are generally identifiable as plays full of fun, irony and dazzling wordplay. They also abound in disguises and mistaken identities, with very convoluted plots that are difficult to follow with very contrived endings.

Shakespeare's comedies can be recognized in terms of plot, structure and characters. We can see that Shakespearean comedies follow the same structural pattern, a basic plot on which the play is based. For example, a key feature of all comedies is that they depend upon the resolution of their plots. However, Shakespeare's comedies are distinguishable, as some are classed as comic dramas and others as romantic comedies. In comic drama, there is usually a motif of a place where reality and the unreal merge, the roles of characters are reversed and identities are mistaken or lost. This place may take on the form of a feast or celebration, or it may be presented as a place segregated from the normal society, such as the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream. When scenes are set in this place, the ordinary rules of life and society do not apply. There is always an experience of chaos, which must be resolved in order for the play to become a true comedy.William Shakespeare's plays come in many forms. There are histories, tragedies, comedies and tragic comedies. Among the most popular are the comedies which are full of laughter, irony, satire and wordplay. Many times the question is asked: what makes a play a comedy instead of a tragedy. Shakespeare's comedies often use puns, metaphors and insults to provoke 'thoughtful laughter'. The action is often strained by artificiality, especially elaborate and contrived endings. Disguises and mistaken identities are often very common. Opposed to that are the tragedies, where the reader would find death, heartbreak, and more serious plots and motives. The plot is very important in Shakespeare's comedies. It is often very convoluted, twisted and confusing, and extremely hard to follow. Other characteristics of Shakespearean comedy are the themes of love and friendship, played within a courtly society.

Songs often sung by a jester or a fool, parallel the events of the plot. Minor characters, which add flavor to the plot, are often inserted into the storyline. Love provides the main ingredient. If the lovers are unmarried when the play opens, they either have not met or there is some obstacle to their relationship. Examples of these obstacles are familiar to every reader of Shakespeare: the slanderous tongues which nearly wreck love in "Much Ado About Nothing", the father insistent upon his daughter marrying his choice, as in "A Midsummer Nights Dream", or the confusion of husbands in "The Comedy of Errors".Comedies head towards marriage. This is a useful place to start thinking about the typical shape of comedies. Marriages conventionally represent the achievement of happiness and the promise of regeneration. So important to Shakespeare is the symbolic power of marriage that some end in more than one marriage. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end with three. In the final scene of As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, takes the stage to preside over no fewer than four nuptial couplings and to celebrate ‘High wedlock’ (5.4.144) in song. All the play’s couples have achieved happiness through misunderstanding. Orlando has wooed Rosalind in make believe, not grasping how poor Aliena, not realising that she is Rosalind’s friend Celia.Phebe the shepherdess had preferred Ganymede (in fact the disguised Rosalind) to the adoring but low-born Silvius, but has learnt her error. Touchstone has won Audrey, the country girl, almost casually by impressing her with his mock courtly talk.This last pairing, founded on vanity and ignorance, seems considerably less satisfying than the other three: even here, in one of the lightest of Shakespeare’s comedies, we are invited not to feel easy about every marriage. In other Shakespeare comedies, some concluding marriages – Claudio and Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, the Duke and Isabella in Measure for Measure – seem designed to look convenient rather than affectionate.In Shakespearean comedies much that is funny arises from the misconceptions of lovers. In Much Ado about Nothing the friends of Benedick, whom we have seen mocking Beatrice and scorning love, arrange for him to overhear them talking about how desperately Beatrice in fact loves him. The trick is enjoyably justified when he next meets Beatrice and determinedly interprets her rudeness as concealed affection. Yet the trick takes us further. Once Beatrice has been deceived by her friends in similar fashion, these two characters, who both once disdained the follies of courtship, are on the path to love and marriage. All this deception would not be amusing if we could not feel confident that it will produce a happy resolution In the play’s sub-plot, the deception of Claudio by Don John indicates how a deceived lover might, in another kind of play, be on his way to creating a tragedy. Interwoven with the plot of Benedick and Beatrice’s love story is the drama of so-called ‘love’ (Claudio for Hero) turned into murderous hate. However satisfying the former courtship, it is shadowed by the vengefulness of the untrusting Claudio.For the most part, Shakespeare’s comedies rely on benign misunderstanding and deception. They therefore put a premium on dramatic irony, where we know better than the perplexed lovers. An outstanding example is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we understand the magic of the love potion, mistakenly applied by Puck to Lysander’s eyes, and can relish not only the love talk he spouts to Helena, but her befuddlement. When Puck, in an effort to remedy his mistake, squeezes the juice onto Demetrius’s eyes and he, waking to see Helena, also pours forth professions of love for her, we hear how easily and eloquently men can think they love one woman or another. Hermia, who thought that Lysander loved her, is furiously jealous while Helena is convinced that there is a conspiracy to deceive her. We laugh at their perplexity because we know that the magic that produced it will eventually resolve it and ensure a happy ending. The lovers will return from the forest, that place of confusion and transgression, to the institution of marriage.
Disguise and gender
A comparable kind of dramatic irony is produced by Shakespeare’s use of disguise in comedy – particularly the disguising of women as young men. In As You Like It there is a delicious comedy in Orlando’s enacted wooing of Rosalind, who prompts him in the guise of a young man to whom he can speak without reticence. In Twelfth Night, Olivia who, mourning her brother’s death, has sworn to be ‘a cloistress’ (1.1.27) and keep herself a veiled recluse for seven years, finds herself smitten by Cesario, a young man sent with messages from Duke Orsino. Cesario is, of course, the disguised Viola, and the comedy of Olivia’s mistakenly amorous responses to him/her is all the funnier because it corrects Olivia’s self-denying and impossible mournfulness. As ever in Shakespeare’s comedies, it takes mistakes to teach characters the truths of their own hearts. Olivia bumps into Viola’s twin brother, Sebastien, and proposes marriage to him. He is hilariously puzzled but compliant; it is as if he knows that he is in a comedy, where accident and error will mysteriously produce happy consequences. The apparent restraint placed upon a playwright of Shakespeare’s day – all women must be played by young male actors – becomes a kind of artistic freedom, enabling the characters to switch their sexual identities.The action of Twelfth Night takes place at some uncertain date in Illyria, an imagined place where the Italian-seeming court of Orsino is neighbour to the apparently English household of Olivia. Several of Shakespeare’s comedies have such highly imaginary settings – the magical wood outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. Only one, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is set in England, and this is an opportunistic piece, written to exploit the popularity of the character of Falstaff. Shakespeare was unusual in invariably finding foreign (and timeless) locations for his comedies. In his day, stage comedy frequently had a contemporary and English (often London) setting. Tragedies took place in Spain, France or Italy; comedies nearer to home. Shakespeare’s best-known rival dramatist, Ben Jonson, set Every Man in His Humour (first performed in 1598) in Italy, but later revised it and relocated it to London, partly in response to popular taste. Later Jonson comedies such as The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair were also set in London and belong to a genre of so-called ‘city comedies’ that attracted other accomplished playwrights such as John Marston and Thomas Middleton.
The boundaries of comedy
Comedy was traditionally a ‘lower’ genre than tragedy or history, and so these comedies by Shakespeare’s contemporaries justified themselves by their satirical ambitions. Satire was a higher genre than other kinds of comedy, commended by classical authors as morally improving. City comedies had a moral purpose: they mocked current follies and vices. Shakespeare was little interested in topical satire. Yet there is some evidence that the rules and conventions governing comedy were loose in Shakespeare’s day. The title pages of the various quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays indicate that generic categories were not hard and fast. The quarto edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) announces it as ‘A Pleasant Conceited Comedy’ and the quarto Taming of the Shrew declares it to be a ‘wittie and pleasant comedie’. Yet the title page of The Merchant of Venice (1600) calls it ‘The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice’.
These title pages – almost certainly composed by booksellers rather than the playwright – tell us about the appeal of word play and contests of wit to Shakespeare’s first audiences. To us The Taming of the Shrew might seem a play about sexual politics, but it was probably initially admired for being ‘wittie’: that is, for featuring two leading characters who were skilled in verbal antagonism. Verbal humour, often dependent on puns and allusions, is sometimes difficult to translate on the modern stage, but it was essential to Elizabethan and Jacobean expectations of comedy. One of Shakespeare’s most popular comic characters, Sir John Falstaff, arrived on the stage in history plays but was celebrated for his verbal dexterity. As he announces, ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (Henry IV, Part 2, 1.2.9–10). The quarto edition of Henry IV, Part 1 (1598) was advertised as including ‘the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe’. Subsequently, the title page of the quarto edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) described it as ‘A most pleasant and excellent Conceited comedie, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor’.Shakespeare was also remarkable for insisting on the comic in the midst of tragedy. All his tragedies include clowning. The most notable example is the Fool in King Lear, who makes jokes out of the King’s predicament and is permitted, under the guise of foolery, to admonish him. All Shakespeare’s major tragedies include a minor character who makes jests at the expense of the tragic actors. Shakespeare was not the first tragedian of his era to do this: Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus features clown scenes parodying the terrible ambition of the play’s protagonist, leading him to sell his soul. What is frightening can also be absurd. Hamlet has the grave-digger joking about mortality. He was often omitted in 18th- and 19th-century productions as offending against dramatic propriety. Also an embarrassment to later interpreters was the Porter in Macbeth, jesting about the effect of alcohol on a man’s sexual performance at the very heart of the play’s darkness. It is often forgotten that even Othello has a Clown. In Act 3, Scene 1, a scene rarely included in modern productions, Othello’s Clown mocks Cassio with doubles entendres about venereal disease that Cassio seems not to understand, comically enacting the cluelessness about sexual motives that lies behind the oncoming tragedy.Tragi-comedy has often been thought to be Shakespeare’s special creation. It is a term that can usefully be applied to four plays that Shakespeare wrote late in his career: The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Though these all end with the prospect of a marriage that will redeem the errors of the past, none of them has much room for laughter. All of them dramatise anger, violence and bitter jealousy. All except The Tempest include the deaths of some characters. They are comedic rather than comic. Critics have long been in the habit of calling them ‘romances’, and the description, dividing them off from the comedies, seems a useful one. On the other hand, some earlier plays – Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and perhaps The Merchant of Venice – while ending in betrothals and containing scenes of comic misunderstanding, have such dark material at their hearts as to escape our usual idea of comedy. The term ‘problem plays’ was coined for this group at the very end of the 19th century. It is a label that has been much contested by critics, but it points to an important fact about Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. Even as he relished comedy he pushed against its limitations.Comical plays were very popular during 16th century England and provided popular opinions in a comical way. This killed two birds with one stone. The message is received by the audience and little offense is paid to anyone who may find themselves affected by the play's lesson. If you have ever watched a movie or seen a play, you're probably aware that sometimes the lesson hits a little too close to home. This is very true for many plays, most especially those written by William Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, you will no doubt find some gut-busting humor. Satire, a literary device that uses humor and jokes to make a statement about a person's ideals, is rampant in Shakespeare's play about love and marriage. The entirety of the play is nothing more than a satire of the ideal of love. Throughout the novel, there are many incidents where Shakespeare satirizes the nature of love - through an ill-mannered play and the arrogance of humans with Bottom's transformation.Examples of Satire within A Midsummer Night's Dream.Have you ever watched a boring movie where there was an element of irony that surprisingly kept you entertained? This is a tactic most writers use to relieve tension and create an important comparison to important topics. There are many examples of satire within A Midsummer Night's Dream. While the social aspect of the satire is a great way to engage spectators, the satirical tone of the play is necessary. Satire becomes the vehicle in which Shakespeare delivers the play's real moral.The satire within the play is layered and combines high comedy and low comedy to mock the idea of love.High Comedy, comedy aimed at wittily mocking the upper class, was a great tool used by Shakespeare in this play. In today's society, you are no doubt familiar with satires aimed at celebrities and politicians.

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is considered Shakespeare's most popular comedy. The Royal Shakespeare Company describes the play as being set in an enchanted forest with fairies, sparring lovers, and amateur actors who are putting on a play.

When exactly was William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream written? Its earliest known printing was in 1600 when it was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company by the bookseller Thomas Fisher and there was mention of the play in 1598. As for the exact date it was written, that's not really known. Scholars and historians have poured over almanacs and Elizabethan history to determine the year in which the play is set. Much of their research was based on one passage, which describes the Queen of Fairyland enduring a cold, wet summer followed by a bad harvest. However, this is mostly a guessing game, as the weather in a play does not always reflect the time in which it was written.
Given the similarities in style, it is widely accepted that A Midsummer Night's Dream was likely written in 1595/6. This is because the play shares the poetic style of Love's Labour Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, all of which were written in the mid 1590's.Performance and Production
The first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream was known with certainty to be at Court on January 1st 1605.
In its original performances, the cast had no access to scenery and only minimal props. This allowed the audience to focus on the costumes, music and language of the play rather than the backdrop or unnecessary props. During these early performances, it was the norm for a group of gifted boy players to take the female roles. William Shakespeare was known for writing his plays with specific players in mind for the parts, so it's no wonder that he meant for the performances to focus on the strengths and talents of the players.In the following centuries, the original play was adapted several times. It was an adapted form of the play that found its first commercial success: Henry Purcell's spectacular 1692 operatic version called The Fairy Queen.In total, William Shakespeare wrote over thirty plays and they are generally divided into three genres: comedy, tragedy, and history. There are slightly more plays in the comedy category than the other two, but there are at least ten plays that fall into each category.

There are specific characteristics of each genre, and they don't always mean what you'd expect, especially with comedy. In our modern culture, usually we associate comedy with humor and as long as the book or movie is funny, it can be considered a comedy. While most of Shakespeare's comedies are funny, contain word play, and involve harmless confusion of identity, one of the most important characteristics of a Shakespearean comedy is that the play ends in marriage. We might now consider this a ''romantic comedy.''

The next most common type of play Shakespeare wrote was tragedies. When we think of the word tragedy, we know that we are talking about something sad, but there are some specific requirements for a Shakespearean play to qualify as a tragedy. First of all, characters die, and usually many of them do. There is a sense that bad things are destined to happen; characters don't have control of their destiny. There is also usually a main character whom we as the audience are supposed to like but who has one major flaw that results in their death.The last category of Shakespearean plays is the histories. This is the genre that Shakespeare wrote the fewest of, but there are eleven plays that involve English history and are about English monarchs, and two that are about Roman history (Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra). These two are sometimes also classified as tragedies.Romeo and Juliet is a play written by Shakespeare. It is a tragic love story where the two main characters, Romeo and Juliet, are supposed to be sworn enemies but fall in love. Due to their families' ongoing conflict, they cannot be together, so they kill themselves because they cannot cope with being separated from one another. Romeo and Juliet is a Shakespearean tragedy.Two wealthy families, the Montagues and the Capulets, have another brawl in the city of Verona. The Prince and the townspeople cannot cope with the constant fighting so the Prince declares that the next person to break the peace will be killed.

Romeo Montague and his friends gatecrash a Capulet party and Romeo meets Juliet Capulet. He falls in love with her instantly. They are shocked to discover they are sworn enemies due to their feuding families. Friar Laurence marries Romeo and Juliet.
Romeo goes to celebrate his marriage with his friends, Mercutio and Benvolio, but gets into a fight with Juliet's cousin, Tybalt. Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo avenges his death by killing Tybalt.
The Prince banishes Romeo because he killed Tybalt. Both Romeo and Juliet are heartbroken.
Capulet, Juliet's father, decides she should marry Paris. Juliet refuses and goes to Friar Laurence where they come up with a plan for Romeo and Juliet to be together.
Juliet fakes her death and lies in a tomb waiting for Romeo to come so they can run away together. Romeo doesn't receive the message about the plan, so thinks Juliet has actually died. He goes to Verona and sees Juliet in her tomb, 'dead'.
Romeo drinks poison so he can be with Juliet in death. She wakes up to discover Romeo is dead. Juliet kills herself with his dagger.
The Capulet and Montague families vow never to argue again.Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–1602 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola, Countess Olivia falls in love with her thinking she is a man. The play expanded on the musical interludes and riotous disorder expected of the occasion,[1] with plot elements drawn from the short story "Of Apollonius and Silla" by Barnabe Rich, based on a story by Matteo Bandello. The first recorded public performance was on 2 February 1602, at Candlemas, the formal end of Christmastide in the year's calendar. The play was not published until its inclusion in the 1623 First Folio.Illyria, the exotic setting of Twelfth Night, is important to the play's romantic atmosphere.Illyria was an ancient region of the Western Balkans whose coast (the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea which is the only part of ancient Illyria which is relevant to the play) covered (from north to south) the coasts of modern-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania. It included the city-state of the Republic of Ragusa which has been proposed as the setting.Illyria may have been suggested by the Roman comedy Menaechmi, the plot of which also involves twins who are mistaken for each other. Illyria is also referred to as a site of pirates in Shakespeare's earlier play, Henry VI, Part 2. The names of most of the characters are Italian but some of the comic characters have English names. Oddly, the "Illyrian" lady Olivia has an English uncle, Sir Toby Belch.It has been noted that the play's setting also has other English allusions such as Viola's use of "Westward ho!", a typical cry of 16th century London boatmen, and also Antonio's recommendation to Sebastian of "The Elephant" as where it is best to lodge in Illyria (The Elephant was a pub not far from the Globe Theatre).Viola is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria and she comes ashore with the help of a Captain. She has lost contact with her twin brother, Sebastian, whom she believes to be drowned, and with the aid of the Captain, she disguises herself as a young man under the name Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino. Duke Orsino has convinced himself that he is in love with Olivia, who is mourning the recent death of her brother. She refuses to see entertainments, be in the company of men, or accept love or marriage proposals from anyone, the Duke included, until seven years have passed. Duke Orsino then uses 'Cesario' as an intermediary to profess his passionate love before Olivia. Olivia, however, falls in love with 'Cesario', setting her at odds with her professed duty. In the meantime, Viola has fallen in love with Duke Orsino, creating a love triangle: Viola loves Duke Orsino, Duke Orsino loves Olivia, and Olivia loves Viola disguised as Cesario.In the comic subplot, several characters conspire to make Olivia's pompous steward, Malvolio, believe that Olivia has fallen for him. This involves Olivia's riotous uncle, Sir Toby Belch; another would-be suitor, a silly squire named Sir Andrew Aguecheek; her servants Maria and Fabian; and her witty fool, Feste. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew engage themselves in drinking and revelry, thus disturbing the peace of Olivia's household until late into the night, prompting Malvolio to chastise them. Sir Toby famously retorts, "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" (Act II, Scene III).

Tragedies may involve comedic moments, but tend towards more serious, dramatic plots with an ending that involves the death of main characters. The main features of a Shakespearean Tragedy are that:

Characters become isolated or there is social breakdown

Ends in death
There is a sense that events are inevitable or inescapable
There is usually a central figure who is noble but with a character flaw which leads them towards their eventual downfall
The plays which are generally classed as Shakespearean Tragedy are: Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Coriolanus, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens and Cymbeline (this is debated, with some scholars classifying it. Shakespeare's Histories focus on English monarchs. They usually play upon Elizebethan propaganda, showing the dangers of civil war and glorifying the queen's Tudor ancestors. The depictions of monarchs including Richard III (an enemy of the Tudors) and Henry V (one of the great Tudor monarchs) have been influential in creating a perception of these kings which has persisted throughout the centuries. Many historians point to inaccuracies in the depictions, but the plays have been very powerful in presenting a particular image which it is hard for many people to see past.The other strand of dramatic tradition was classical aesthetic theory. This theory was derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England, however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and practitioners. At the universities, plays were staged in a more academic form as Roman closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action. Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum and were taught in editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.
References

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/an-introduction-to-shakespeares-comedy/JohnMullan

https://slideplayer.com/slide/10738946/
https://www.123helpme.com/essay/The-Humor-in-William-Shakespeares-Twelfth-Night-117300
https://study.com/academy/lesson/satire-in-a-midsummer-nights-dream.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespearean_come
https://www.newberry.org/literature-reference-sources © 2019 Luke Edley
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