Queer Comedy

This chapter argues that all Shakespearean comedy is queer comedy, and thus that ‘queer comedy’ is itself a terminological redundancy. Insofar as they share a constitutive capaciousness, ‘queer’ and ‘comedy’ mobilize anti-normalizing strategies, the effect of which is to unsettle, and in so doing demythologize, dominant ideas in favor recurrent excess and abundant multiplicity. The at-once deconstructive and generative force of such procedures, which on the stage collude to puncture fantasies of love and desire, perform an excess in love and desire that obtain despite, or rather because of, comedy’s endlessly shifting investments and arcs. Although typically understood as one of Shakespeare’s starkest depictions of violent patriarchal heterosociality, Much Ado About Nothing deploys queer-comic procedures that facilitate playgoers’ encounters with the full range of contradictions and vicissitudes inherent in, and indeed constitutive of, what is termed humanity.

Shakespearean Comedy and the Question of Race

In the comedies Shakespeare offers glimpses of the world’s ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, and raises the question of whether a culturally and racially diverse world can transcend the tragic forces inherent in racial, ethnic, and religious strife and therefore imagine a progressive, forward-looking social paradigm. This chapter thoroughly examines the question of race in Shakespeare’s comedies, offering a comprehensive discussion of race and racism, caricature and humour, the aggression of language, the centrality and prominence of images of whiteness, and a sense of global interconnectedness intertwined with fear of foreign influence. Therefore, the comedies raise the potential for inclusion in exclusion and the potential for exclusion in inclusion. Shakespeare approaches racial issues and ethnic contrasts to reveal subtle connections in contrasts, and the cultural forces of exclusion that inclusion of difference entails.

Problem Comedies

This chapter challenges the traditional term ‘problem play’ to categorize Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well and instead looks at them as ‘comedies of rule’, in which young lovers seeking romantic felicity share the stage with rulers seeking power. Earlier comedies, of course, feature rulers such as dukes or kings, but in these the political interests of (mostly) benevolent rulers are aligned with the romantic interests of young lovers. In Troilus, Measure, and All’s Well, rulers, far from felicitously reconciling the assertion of their own power and the liberation of lovers from oppressive parents, consolidate political authority by regulating romantic desire. The chapter argues that this darker version of the comic ruler is a response to James I’s absolutist construction of the relation between rex and lex and his investment in fashioning himself as parens patriae.

Comedies of Tough Love

Shakespeare’s comedies feature characters who are always open to the possibilities of Ovidian transformation, and in four comedies in particular—Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Much Ado about Nothing—the transformation can be a painful one. This chapter surveys these four comedies in order to understand the relationship between teaching and taming. I engage with recent Shakespeare criticism that foregrounds the importance of Ovid’s work to the rhetorical practices of Tudor-era grammar schools. I also draw upon readings of Ovid’s Heroides, Ars Amatoria, and Metamorphoses in order to articulate a vision of a pedagogical enterprise that on the one hand privileged translation and transformation and on the other hand attempted to regulate the bodies of Tudor schoolboys. In doing so, I explore the complex Ovidian engagements that produced knowledge of the body and of relationships in Shakespeare’s culture and on his stage.

Holy Adultery

This essay tries to explain the curiously positive role played by adultery in Shakespearean comedy as an echo of, and a commentary on, its role in Christianity. Medieval dramatists had found in scripture everything necessary for a sacred comedy whose ‘matter and ground’ (to borrow the formulation of an early modern antitheatricalist) was ‘Love, Bawdrie, Cosonage, Flatterie, Whoredome, Adulterie’ and which, partly for that reason, came to be suppressed. In its place, Shakespearean comedy repeatedly shows marital vows forging precisely the sort of commitment on which Christians are most likely to default; and this default, rather than simply betraying their love, functions as its premise—an opportunity, if nothing else, for one believer to exercise over another the highest Christian ideal: that of forgiveness. As a consequence married love is not so much threatened as sustained by the fantasy of adultery and the subsequent mercy that this fantasy demands.

Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies

While they might seem like ‘toys’ or ‘trifles’, stage properties in Shakespeare’s comedies subtly unsettle the relationship between human subject and non-human object. Even such seemingly innocuous comedic props as letters (in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and rings (in The Merchant of Venice) can be given incommensurate weight by the comic plot. Drawing on both semiotic and phenomenological accounts of stage props as well as the synthesis of these approaches in the work of Erika Lin and Andrew Sofer, this essay explores the broad continuum between the comically disruptive misdirected letter and absent, irreplaceable objects like Shylock’s turquoise ring and demonstrates just how rigorously Shakespeare’s comic props test our investment in comedic narrative and the comic resolution.

The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy

This essay argues that Shakespearean comedies evoke and confound associations between female interiority and domestic space. Drawing on The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, and The Taming of the Shrew, I show how characters expect access to domestic space to reveal incontrovertible truths about female bodies and minds. These assumptions, however, are foiled, as architecture is more often associated with confusion and obfuscation than with the acquisition of knowledge. Moreover, Shakespeare presents the domestic scene as a scene, a site for the mastery and performance of roles, rather than the expression of genuine human desires. In this way, the presentation of domestic architecture undercuts the conventions of the comic marriage plot. At the same time, though, these plays reveal that within the strictures of a particular social world, the successful domestic performance is a matter of life and death.

Comedy and Eros

This essay explores the complex, destabilizing power of desire and erotic attachment in Shakespeare’s comedies, examining same-sex as well as heterosexual couplings. It considers the various forms—social, literary, and linguistic—through with eroticism is ‘comprehended’ (in all senses of the word) in the plays, including the form of comedy itself; it questions to what extent these forms are presented as adequate to contain the disruptive or amorphous desires within them. Particular attention is therefore given to the ends of plays and to issues of erotic satisfaction and closure. Focusing on formal as well as thematic and characterological expressions of eroticism allows us to complicate earlier critical assessments of such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, both of which are examined in detail here. Brief analyses are also provided of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado about Nothing.

Green Comedy

The marriage-driven and reconciliatory structures of Shakespeare’s comic form resemble traditional ecological understandings of the interconnections in nature. Over the past forty years, literary ecocriticism has explored parallels between the way literary texts are formed and ecological structures. One seminal claim that helped launch the ecocritical movement in the 1970s was biologist Joseph Meeker’s assertion that comedy is the genre of ecological harmony. This chapter tests Meeker’s adaptive theory by looking at As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Putting Meeker’s sentimental notions of natural harmony in touch with post-equilibrium ecological thinking and twenty-first-century ecocritical work that recognizes catastrophe as a ‘natural’ structure produces a more dynamic notion of comedy. By juxtaposing green pastoral spaces with their blue oceanic opposites, Shakespeare’s comedies offer global and expansive notions of natural order and disorder, ones better suited to an age of ecological disaster.

The Humours in Humour

Did Shakespeare believe in the four humours? And did he write ‘humours comedy’? To address these questions, this chapter suggests that humoral theory is intimately bound up with early modern ideas of selfhood, not merely as a metaphor, but as a literal understanding of the processes at work in cognition, emotion, and selfhood. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, is taken as a case study for how Shakespearean comedy understands the relationship between mind and body. Next, it re-examines the idea of ‘humours comedy’, arguing that we should see the true Shakespearean ‘comedy of humours’ in plays that celebrate not the fixity of identity, but its fluidity within a sentient body conceived of in terms of humours theory. The chapter takes as its closing case study The Comedy of Errors, suggesting that it, and Shakespearean comedy more generally, engages through the humours ideas of selfhood as mutable, communicable, and liquid.