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A Time for Digression
 On Sunday came the
terrible news of an old friend’s agonizing death.
 But
life goes on, doesn’t it? On Monday I had to get back to my deadlines, my
column, and a book, and just as I was wondering what it might take to knock
Don Imus and Al Sharpton off the front pages, I found out the hard way.
If
you’re like me, maybe you’re not in the mood for more
commentary on mass murder, and maybe you could even use a bit of
comedy. Just before I got the news from Virginia Tech, I had a hearty laugh
at Charlie Chaplin boxing in City Lights, and then life stopped
being funny until further notice.
So
pardon me if I do what I think I do best: digress. Change the subject. And
today I digress about one of the happiest subjects I know, Shakespearean
comedy.
Ancient Greece and Rome boasted playwrights who wrote great
tragedies — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca — and
others who wrote great comedies — Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence
— but none who wrote both. The two genres didn’t seem to mix.
You don’t go to Sophocles for laughs, and Aeschylus, with all due
respect, rarely hits the old funny bone. Some guys just can’t tell a
joke.
Enter, a couple of thousand years later, William Shakespeare, the
first dramatist ever to write immortal comedies as well as tragedies. Not
only that, he defied the rules by refusing to keep them apart. His wittiest
comedies are not without grief, and his tragedies offer plenty of good
laughs. In this respect he was indeed “a happy imitator of
nature.”
One
of Shakespeare’s best commentators, Dr. Samuel Johnson, said that
his natural bent was for comedy, but that his tragedies tended to be forced
and bombastic. It’s also a little startling to realize that one of the
first celebrations of “our pleasant Willy,” in Edmund
Spenser’s Tears of the Muses (1591), singles out his
genius for comedy, not tragedy. Willy is one “whom Nature self had
made To mock her self, and Truth to imitate” and “that same
gentle Spirit, from whose pen Large streams of honey and sweet nectar
flow.” Nearly all early tributes to Shakespeare hit the same notes:
honey, nature, sweet, gentle. Spenser also contrasts him with
“base-born men.”
“Willy,” Shakespeare, was actually Edward de Vere,
Earl of Oxford, known for his “fickle head” and tendency to
clown at court, much praised (by Spenser, among others, as “most
dear” to the Muses) for his poetry and plays and in 1598 cited by
Francis Meres “among the best for comedy.”
Most of the Bard’s charming comedies have dark streaks
in them, including death and its threat: Think of Shylock and his pound of
flesh, the slandered women in Much Ado About Nothing,
Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, the
sexual blackmail of Measure for Measure.
![[Breaker quote for A Time for Digression: Comedy's master]](2007breakers/070419.gif) His
mature tragedies are unthinkable without his rich humor: Hamlet’s brilliant sarcasm and
bantering, King Lear’s cruelly funny Fool, Romeo’s bawdy pal
Mercutio, Cleopatra’s feminine wiles. And does Troilus and
Cressida belong among the tragedies or the “problem
comedies,” with All’s Well That Ends Well?
And
where do we put the Bard’s supreme comic character, Sir John
Falstaff? He is the life of both Henry IV plays, is banished by his old pal
Prince Hal at the end of the second one, then dies of a broken heart In
Henry V.
Falstaff illustrates how Shakespeare loves his secondary
characters so much that he sometimes lets one kidnap the play. The
brilliantly caustic Bastard takes over King John. Falstaff does
this (twice, in fact); so does Shylock; Mercutio nearly does it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream belongs to the
hilarious clown Nick Bottom. Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s
funeral is the greatest piece of extended sarcasm in all literature. I’ll
have to save some of my favorites, Hotspur, Enobarbus, and Imogen, for
another day, along with the dueling comic lovers: Kate and Petruchio,
Rosalind and Berowne, Beatrice and Benedick, the other Rosalind and Orlando.
Othello is driven by Iago’s wickedness, but
he is far from humorless. Such monsters as Richard III and the bastard
Edmund in King Lear make us laugh at better men, but they
are delightful anyway.
I
hope I’ve taken your mind off the grim news for a moment. Let Dr.
Johnson have the last word: “He that has read Shakespeare with
attention will perhaps find little new in the crowded world.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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