Sos Bagramyan
In the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623 shortly after his death, the table of contents gives the reader three genres in which Shakespeare wrote: comedy, history and tragedy. What we today call the romances, were listed under the genre of tragedies and comedies. Shakespeare was the only playwright of his period to successfully write in all of these four dramatic genres. What follows is a short overview introducing those dramatic genres.
Comedy
When we think of the comic genre today, we usually associate it with humor. One is more apt to think of the television show “Friends” in America , or the show “Vervaratsner” in Armenia , than what a Renaissance audience understood to be comedy. But comedy does not refer to the humor content of a piece of literature as much as it does the structure. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is easily identifiable as a comedy because it is a humorous play, but the only thing that makes a play like Measure for Measure a comedy is its structure. Measure for Measure has moments of humor in it, but it is in large part a dark and unsettling play. A comic structure, in the broadest terms, involves a situation which begins with confusion and discord and ends in reconciliation and harmony. This is why a work like Dante’s Commedia is considered a comedy, although its major themes are weighty and serious.
In the case of a the Renaissance stage, comedies involved couples and almost always ended in marriage (and if not marriage, then the promise of marriage to come as in Love’s Labors Lost ). In these comedies, there is usually something that gets in the way of a couple being together and through a series of disguises and misunderstandings, the couples find themselves together at the end. In Much Ado About Nothing Benedick and Beatrice’s pride is the initial obstacle they must overcome to be together, and in The Taming of the Shrew it is Kate’s shrewish personality that must be domesticated by Petruchio in order for the couple to wed. The marriage with which a comedy concludes implies unity, harmony and the continuity of life.
But what about laughter? A comic situation is sometimes considered humorous because of the conventions in which a play is written. Feste is unusually cruel to the sour-faced Malvolio in Twelfth Night , and his treatment of him would usually be seen as cruel if it were not within the context of a comedy. The audience knows that because they are watching a comedy, no one is in real danger and everything will be alright in the end. Just like when we watch the Ashot Ghazarian get hurt or humiliated on television, we don’t empathize with him because we know that he will be alright, that his pain is not real because it fits within the conventions of slapstick comedy. This reassuring feeling is what drives the sense of mirth in Renaissance drama. Even though Shakespeare uses disguises, wordplay, misunderstandings and general confusion throughout the play, the audience generally laughs and takes pleasure in the characters’ misfortune because they know things will turn out well in the end.
Shakespeare always played with the genres in which he wrote and was a master of mixing elements of tragedy in comedy and vice versa. The ability to combine such elements made his plays richer to watch and richer to think about after the show was over. Some of the problems raised in a Shakespeare play may not be satisfactorily resolved by the marriage at the end. For example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Demetrius is still under the spell of Puck’s magic potion when he marries Helena . In Measure for Measure , Isabella is forced into a marriage with the Duke even though she has spent the whole play defending her chastity from the advances of Angelo. Although the comic genre generally upholds the conventions of the society in which it is written, it brings to mind some of the most unnerving aspects concerning those conventions. Although the endings are always happy, the means by which those happy endings are achieved are sometimes dubious in Shakespearean comedy.
Tragedy
The term Tragedy, like comedy, refers to a play’s dramatic structure, and it is one that is diametrically opposed to comedy. Whereas comedy begins with disorder or a problem and ends with harmony and marriage, tragedy begins with relative order and ends in disharmony and death. There is another important distinction between tragedy and comedy that Northrop Frye points out in his book Anatomy of Criticism : comedies usually deal with groups of people (couples) or a community, whereas tragedies focus in on the misfortune of an individual. One need only look at the titles of Shakespeare’s plays to notice this distinction. As You Like It, Love’s Labor’s Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well are all comedies and have titles which indicate a general theme in the story. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Tragedy of King Lear are all tragedies that revolve around the misfortunes of an individual.
The tragic hero is usually an aristocrat or a great and important individual who suffers a great misfortune, thus making his misfortune seem larger than life. In King Lear , when the king suffers, nature itself reacts in a storm and the kingdom falls into chaos. The audience is intended to feel pity and fear as a result of what he or she sees happening on stage and is intended to derive moral lessons from the misfortunes of the individual characters for whom he or she empathizes. We watch Hamlet, empathize with him and learn from his example even though he dies at the end. The famous movie, Saroyan Yeghbayrnere , is an example of a more contemporary tragedy in which the audience shares in the pain and suffering of two brothers serving in opposing armies. As with all tragedies, Saroyan Yeghbayrnere, ends in death, separation and discord.
What makes tragic characters inspiring and interesting is their reaction to their unfortunate situations. Hamlet, a character so beloved and embraced by Armenians that the character’s name has become commonplace in Armenian culture, is asked by his father’s ghost to kill his uncle, and he spends much of the play vacillating and moralizing on such concepts such as family, nature, life and death.
In his soliloquies, which are a reaction to the dark and unnatural task he has been given, are where the audience hears Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings which reach into all facets of life. It is his thoughts that make the audience sympathize and grow attached to Hamlet, not his actions. And so when Hamlet suffers a downfall, the audience feels pity and fear. At the beginning of King Lear, Lear is a powerful and intimidating figure. As the play progresses, Lear falls into misfortune and realizes his own frailties and shortcomings. When King Lear is shouting in the storm, he says that he is not invulnerable to the sicknesses (“agues”) that afflict all human beings. At this moment a king is brought down to the level of a regular human being, and can thus make an emotional connection with the audience.
Tragic characters are always flawed in a fundamental way. Hamlet’s flaw is that he cannot make up his mind. King Lear’s flaw is that he gives up his crown before his death and is foolish enough to trust his two evil daughters over his one good daughter, Cordelia. Macbeth’s flaw is that he gives too much credence to the prophecies of the weird sisters. Tragic characters, especially those of Shakespeare, can also be said to have more than one flaw, or rather it is unclear what their flaws actually are. But it is always a human flaw in these larger-than-life characters that leads to their downfall.
Just as Shakespeare puts elements of tragedy in his comedies, he puts elements of comedy in his tragedies. In Macbeth, the scene in which the porter hears a knocking at the door and does not answer the door for over thirty lines is darkly funny. Or the scenes in King Lear in which the Fool makes fun of King Lear’s foolishness while trying to educate his master about his shortcomings are both humorous and insightful. Shakespeare followed the dramatic conventions of tragedy and comedy only to a certain extent, but he always blended aspects of the two in order to better reflect nature and real life (which is a mix of tragedy and comedy) and to also make his plays and characters more ambiguous and interesting.
History
The histories pose the greatest obstacle for the modern Armenian (and American) reader because the reader is not as familiar with the kings and history of England as the English public today, or of Shakespeare’s day. If someone was to make a film or write a play about the life of Tigran the Great, for example, Armenians would instantly know what the film was about even before they see it, whereas an American audience would most likely be lost as to who Tigran the Great was and what he accomplished. In fact, many Shakespeare’s history plays were fairly recent and would be in the consciousness of the theatergoing public. Richard III, for example, ends with the death of King Richard III and the ascension of King Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather. Therefore it is important to know where Shakespeare got the sources for his history plays, as well as the history of England itself, to fully appreciate these plays.
Shakespeare’s primary source for his history plays was a book written by the historian Raphael Holinshed entitled Chronicles of England , Scotland and Ireland , or Holinshed’s Chronicles. It was part of a project to write the history of the world, but this proved too ambitious and too costly so he limited himself to about the history of Britain . Holinshed’s Chronicles is actually a very reliable and accurate account of the history of England , so it can be said that Shakespeare used a reliable source for his plays. In the 1590’s, history plays and comedies were very popular in England . Their popularity is attributable in part to the great British naval victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, then the most powerful military force in the world. The large and slow Spanish ships stood little chance against the more nimble and agile British ships, and so Britain established its naval supremacy at this decisive moment in history (a naval supremacy that they retained almost until the end of World War II). This military victory caused a wave of nationalism in England , and people were generally in high spirits. They wanted to see happy comedies and plays about the history of their nation. Shakespeare followed public demand by writing mostly histories and comedies the first half of his career.
It is important to remember that Shakespeare was not a historian, but a dramatist. His aim was not to give his audience a history lesson, but to give them a dramatic spectacle which was inspired by the history of their country. A history book relates facts and dates, but it does not engage the reader emotionally in the motivation of the characters behind great historical events. This motivational void is one that the dramatists fill with their imagination. History plays were popular because they gave an audience a look behind the scenes, at what prompted the great figures of their past to make the decisions that they made. Of course, Shakespeare’s plays are not always completely historically accurate, and they are not meant to be. He also takes people and events and distorts them to fit his artistic vision. For example, the deposing of Richard II took years to accomplish, but Shakespeare compresses the dramatic action down to only a few months in order to heighten the dramatic effect of a king being deposed from his throne. King Richard III had no deformities in real life, but Shakespeare gives him a hunchback in his play in order to physically reflect the moral deformities of the evil King Richard. In fact, Shakespeare’s image of King Richard III is more popular now than what history has shown us; most people think that he was indeed born with physical defects when in reality he was not.
The themes raised in history plays deal with problems and issues of kingship, divine authority and the rise and fall of dynasties. Like tragedies, they are meant to teach moral lessons to their audience, to evoke emotions, such as pity, fear and admiration, and to show the English people the greatness and the shortcomings of their historical figures. Shakespeare was very careful to put little political commentary in his plays, not only because this would have made his plays less interesting and more didactic, but also because if he said the wrong thing in a play about, let’s say, one of Queen Elizabeth’s ancestors he would have gotten into serious trouble with the authorities. What Shakespeare gives his audience in his history plays are dramatic renditions of historical events. They are, naturally, interpretations of history, but they do not aim to lead an audience into any one direction of interpretation. They are as ambiguous and as open to different readings as his tragedies or comedies, and the issues they raise go well beyond the borders of England and the reigns of individual monarchs. They can be thought- provoking to people of a various cultural and historical backgrounds because they touch upon ideas of leadership (both positive and negative) applicable to the histories of many nations.
Romance
Audience taste and dramatic genres are in constantly flux. As mentioned before, Shakespeare wrote primarily histories and comedies in the 1590s partly because that is what his audience demanded to see at the time. In the early 1600s, people were more interested in in seeing tragedies, and this was the period in which Shakespeare wrote his great tragic works. Toward the end of his career, a new dramatic genre was developing in England that did not fit into any of the classical genres. It came to be called romance, which comes from the French and German word roman, which simply means “story” or “novel”.
Shakespeare’s romances include, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Toward the end of his career Shakespeare was a more adventurous writer who did not stick as closely to the classical models of drama as some of his contemporaries, and the romances are plays in which he ventures into new and interesting thematic and aesthetic territories with his craft.
In their structure, romances are most like comedies in that they begin with a problem or disorder and end in harmony and marriage. The plays usually involve couples and journeys or romantic fulfillment. This is, however, where the similarities end. Romances have darkly tragic overtones that pervade the plot. In The Tempest , for example, a group of people are stranded on a mysterious island ruled by a powerful wizard named Prospero. Romances usually incorporate magic and mystical encounters in faraway, strange lands. As a result, loss and recovery, separation and reunion are dominant themes in the romances. Romances also incorporate long journeys, which are uncommon to the comic genre. In Pericles, the main character travels throughout the Mediterranean. In these journeys, the main character usually undergoes a significant change. By the end of the play, characters miraculously recover what seemed irrevocably lost. In Cymbeline, Imogen is reunited with her husband Posthumous after she believed he was dead. Also, in romances, supernatural forces are seen at work. Jupiter himself comes down from the heavens to resolve the seemingly unresolvable situation in Cymbeline .
One of the results of the mystical quality of romances is that Shakespeare blurs the border between imagination and reality. The craft of the artist and the predominance of the playwright’s craft over the action in the play are highlighted by miraculous means through which resolution is achieved. It is the artist who performs the magic and the miracles in the plays via the characters he creates. The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote, and Prospero’s speech at the end of the play is usually seen as the bard’s farewell to theater. Thus, Shakespeare the artist (not Shakespeare the man) identifies himself and his craft with the magical character Prospero. This gesture brings to the forefront the artist’s role in the creative process, and even blurs the audience’s distinction between the creator and his creation. The ultimate result of this ambiguity is the audience’s elevated awareness that reality itself is a product of the imagination and that we construct our own world through language just as the playwright has constructed the world of his play with the dialogue given to his characters.
Final Word on Genres
The distinctions between genres described above are not meant to describe the boundaries of Shakespeare’s art, nor the art of any other playwright of the Renaissance. They are merely reference points from which one can begin to frame the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. As mentioned earlier in passing, Shakespeare mixed styles and genres, which means that many of his plays cannot be exclusively categorized into any single mode of writing. Phrases like “problem plays” are given to works like Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice because these plays do not fit into the conventional genres of comedy. “Serio-comic” is an adjective used to describe characters like Feste from Twelfth Night and the Fool from King Lear because they imbue their seemingly foolish and flippant language with wisdom and insight and thus do not fit into stock character types of the period. Such ambiguities are what give Shakespeare’s plays their longevity and appeal, and they are what make his characters seem more organic and true to life. Individuals in the real world to not easily fit into character types, nor can real world situations be subordinate to dramatic genres. To make his plays reflect the ambiguities of the real world, Shakespeare’s writing often transcends such categorical limitations; hence, their timeless appeal.