The Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Comedies: 1900–1953

Summary

The boldest critic is apt to become modest when he writes of Shakespeare’s comedies; he is afraid of taking a joke or a fancy too seriously. While the tragedies and histories seem to invite his serious attention, the comedies evade it; on the point of expounding the ‘meaning’ of a comedy, he hears a whisper, “But that’s all one, our play is done.” He may be sure that he has seen a “most rare vision”, but he will prudently judge that it is “past the wit of man to say what dream it was”. This modesty has often restricted criticism to praise and the expression of enjoyment.

Comparison with other comedies has encouraged this attitude. Dowden in his essay on 'Shakespeare as a Comic Dramatist' in Gayley's Representative English Comedies, I (1903), A. H. Thorndike in his English Comedy (1929), George Gordon in Shakespearian Comedy (1944), and many others, have dissociated Shakespeare's comedies from theories derived from Aristotle, Meredith, and Bergson; his plays are not 'corrective', and our laughter comes from a “gaiety... absolutely incompatible with contempt and indignation”. Seeing that Shakespeare's comedy has no satiric meaning, many critics have presumed that it has no 'meaning'at all. In 1905, for example, Stopford Brooke wrote of As You Like It:

The solemn professor, the most solid moralist, will not be able to assert that Shakespeare wrote this play with a moral purpose, or from a special desire to teach mankind. He wrote it as he liked it, for his own delight.