Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Shakespeare, like all good writers, knew that the Devil could not be defeated for all time.

We see all the horrors that come with Richard and his world, indeed we are his confidants, privy from the first to his plots and plans. Yet readers and

audiences are perpetually fascinated and spellbound, captivated by the unique personality that is Richard III.

the victory of theater over history.

The Comedy of Errors

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IKE MANY of Shakespeare's comedies, The Comedy of Errors begins with an inflexible law and the human dilemma caused by the law's impersonal enforcement.

The depth of this play lies in its surface.

The hint of tragedy (Egeon's death sentence at sundown) and the tonality of romance give way to a more

physical comedy of substitutions and misrecognitions, and it is easy to underestimate the sophistication of the play's devices.

two plays by the Roman playwright Plautus, Menaechmi and Amphitruo.

Shakespeare complicated this plot by adding a second set of twins, the servant Dromios, to the original pair,

From Amphitruo Shakespeare took the episode of the dinner served by the wife to the “wrong” brother,

As for the essentially comic—yet always potentially dangerous—plot element of identical twins, it was a device of particular interest to Shakespeare as a playwright, and also, perhaps, as a man. Himself the father of twins,

Many characters in other plays, while not literally twins, use the metaphor of twinship as a sign of their intimate friendship, especially in youth. In at least two such instances, Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, the very interchangeability of the friends, their vaunted twinship, leads to sexual jealousy and rivalry.

The twin plot, like the storm at sea, contributes at once to the physical comedy and to the psychological or emotional unfolding of the plot.

Losing oneself to find oneself is a frequent and powerful theme in Shakespearean drama, and especially in the comedies.

The main plot of the play is comic, although it is framed by Egeon's death sentence and the menace of the advancing day.

The Comedy of Errors offers a fascinating roster of female roles, each character in her way a type that will recur in later Shakespeare plays: wife, sister/friend, courtesan,

comic servant, abbess. Perhaps unexpectedly, it is the wife who voices the more “feminist” sentiments, her unmarried sister who speaks up for traditional wifely subservience.

The antiblazon, also familiar from Italian as well as from English sources, describes the emphatically un ideal and materially real characteristics of a woman, focusing on her body below the neck rather than above it.

(This reference in The Comedy of Errors is in fact Shakespeare's only mention of “America,”

For, as we will see, the threat of death frames

all Shakespearean comedy. No character we meet in the course of a play will die, but outside, just beyond the boundary of the stage, death lurks and threatens.

Most of Shakespeare's plays pay scant attention to the supposed “unities” of time, place, and action, but in The Comedy of Errors all are scrupulously observed.

One of the great structural clevernesses of this play is that the mode of farce leads the audience to have confidence in its own superior knowledge:

the pattern of this early comedy anticipates many of the key gestures of the late romances Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest: the family reunion, the theme of losing and finding, some revelations dramatically anticipated by the

audience and others that will come as a surprise to them, and the presence of a wise figure of experience—the

who presides over the theatrical denouement. All are hallmarks of S...

Marriage—or the promise of marriage—is the hallmark of dramatic comedy, bondage often the prelude to freedom.

Love's Labour's Lost

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this early play contains themes, embedded art forms, social laws, and character types that will recur over and over in later and better-known

known plays, from the idea of losing oneself to find oneself to the play-within-the-play that mirrors, and mocks, the pretensions of the aristocratic audience on and off the stage.

Love's Labour's Lost begins, as do many of Shakespeare's comedies, with an inflexible law that is sure to be challenged.

a sign that the King and his friends don't fully understand themselves or the nature of human nature, and it is thus, from the beginning, doomed to fail.

The King and Princess are the ranking couple here, but the play's protagonists, the wittiest and least conventional pair of lovers, are Berowne and Rosaline, who prefigure, in their flying bouts of wordplay, the

similarly witty and wonderful Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing.

a down-to-earth clown, or rustic, Costard

Costard is one of the earliest of Shakespeare's wonderfully pragmatic “wise fools,” like Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. His earthiness stands in implicit contrast to the lofty theoretical sentiments of the King and his friends.

The scene unfolds brilliantly, almost itself like a sophisticated verse form, abcd dcba.

A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind. A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive. They sparkle still the right Promethean fire. They are the books, the arts, the academes

That show, contain, and nourish all the world. 4.3.301–327

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves, Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths. 4.3.335–336

The familiar theme of losing oneself to find oneself resonates throughout Love's Labour's

Lost, as it has in The Comedy of Errors. It is the story of Shakespearean comedy writ little, and we will encounter it again and again,

throughout the play, the women are far more sophisticated and wise than the men,

By structuring his play with “high” and “low” plots that mirror each other, Shakespeare is able to poke fun at the pretenses of the characters in the former and to cede the moral high ground to those in the latter.

Reminders of death, in fact, come thick and fast at the end of Love's Labour's Lost.

The offstage death of the King of France (a personage already described in the first scene of the play as “decrepit, sick, and bedrid” [1.1.136]) is a hallmark of Shakespearean comedy, for these comedies are consistently bounded by tragedy and loss, just beyond the horizon of the play.

This is a play that reads “hard” and plays “easy.”