Shakespeare- The Tragedy of the Comedy

    For many characters in Shakespeare's comedies, love immediately becomes a difficult, seemingly impossible, pursuit. In two of these plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, the main characters, and often minor characters, struggle with the complication of love until the play eventually results in the solution of marriage. Since the plays' endings comprise the protagonist's marriage, they fulfill the qualifications of a comedy. According to M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, "a comedy is a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse [the readers]..., and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters" (38). Though most of Shakespeare's comedic writing includes witty language and a few amusing, idiotic individuals, the characters' depressed emotions concerning love and the tragic elements of the pursuit of it often obscure the comic tone of the language. "The term [tragedy] is broadly applied to literary...representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist" (Abrams 331). The distinction between these two dramatic genres resides primarily in the denouement of the action. In Shakespeare's comedy plays, the events and the characters' emotional reactions to them provide a foundation similar to that of his tragedies, and the plots structurally follow the plot of a traedy, yet the nuptial conclusions account for their definition as comedies. Shakespeare establishes advrsity within his comedies with the characters' relationships and nearly erases the line dividing the two genres.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the principal characters encounter love's difficulty from the outset. Hermia and Lysander are in love and want to get married, but Hermia's father, Egeus, wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, who "is a worthy gentleman" (1.1.52). In the city of Athens, hermia must live according to the law, which says that Egeus "may dispose of her;/ Which shall be either to [Demetrisu],/ Or to her death" (1.1.42-4). Thus, if hermia chooses to stay true to her love and follow her heart, she must accept her own death. This immediately establishes a relationship between love and death, or love and suffering, and this foreshadowing correctly suggests that the characters will suffer due to their love. Hermia and Lysander must escape the boundaries of Athens' laws, which will equate to the boundaries that love often imposes on its sufferers. Though these two must overcome external obstacles to achieve happiness, the other characters suffer internally and encounter emotional dilemmas to their love.

Demetrius suffers from his unrequited love because Hermia loves another man and ignores his attempts to marry her. His pain is evident when he asks "where is Lysander and fair Hermia?/ The one I'll [slay]; the other [slayeth] me" (2.1.189-90). Here, Demetrius insinuates that his deprivation of love kills him. Again, a character links love to death and connotes the tragic undertone of the play, for, while these plays do not have physical deaths within their plots, like Shakespeare's tragedies, each character seems to be dying emotionally because of his inability to marry the object of his affection. Another character, Helena, loves Demetrius, and her agony is analogous to his because he does not return her feelings. Helena begs Demetrius to "use [her] but as [his] spaniel; spurn [her], strike [her],/ Neglect [her], lose [her]" (2.1.205-6). Though these actions exhibit extremely negative imagey, Helena is willing to undergo this abuse now in hopes that Demetrius will someday return her love. She then states that she will "follow [him] and make a heaven of hell,/ To die upon the hand [she loves] so well" (2.1.243-4). Not only does Hermia again associate love with death and suggest that her love is worth dying for, but she also designates her current situation as a hell. With this simple word, Shakepseare vividly evokes an image of the internal hell helena experiences and the intensity of her pain.

Later, the four characters encounter altered difficulties because of the poisoned flower. Now, both men love Helena rather than Hermia. This situation further confuses and complicates the characters' pursuit of love. These evident love triangles investigate the question of love's difficulty based on imbalanced love. For these four characters, a simple imbalance in numbers intervenes with love's natural consonance. Finally, this play most outrageously illustrates the difficulty of love when Titania falls in love with Bottom, who now has a donkey's head. This interspecies relationship exemplifies a physical imbalance of love, as it embodies the physical impossibility of consummating their love, so their relationship acts as a carnal incarnation of the other characters' emotional restraints.

In Twelfth Night, none fo the characters in love with another can fulfill his desire. Orsino loves Olivia, which we discover from the very beginning of Act 1, yet she continously rejects his marriage proposals. Orsino pleads to his musicians "if music be the food of love, play on" (1.1.1), so, he explains, his "appetite may sicken, and so die" (1.1.3). This addresses this play's theme that love is unwanted, for Orsino wishes to overdose on the music, so that he no longer desires Olivia. Unrequited love, as is common throughout Twelfth Night, is undesirable because of the pain and agony of rejection the lover feels. These characters associate love with an unavoidable pain that accompanies it because these feelings have been inseparable to them. Again, Shakespeare presents love as a cause of suffering. Likewise, Viola falls in love with Orsino, but he is not even technically aware of her existence. Orsino only knows Viola as Cesario because she has disguised herself as this man. here, Plot restricts Viola's confession of her devotion, as she must conceal her true feelings for Orsino in order to also conceal her identity. When speaking about herself to Orsino, as Cesario, Viola states that "she never told her love,/ But let concealment like a worm i' th' bud/ Feed on her damask cheek; she pin'd in thought/ And with a green and yellow melancholy/ She sate like Patience on a monument,/ Smiling at grief" (2.4.110-5). This imagery provides the reader with evidence of Viola's distress for her great passion for Orsino and her inability to admit it.

Orsino often professes his love of Olivia to Viola and even sends her, disguised as Cesario, to win Olivia's hand in marriage, which adds to Viola's discomfort. Olivia, however, rather than reciprocating Orsino's love, develops feelings for Cesario, who is actually a woman and does not return the love. Again, Shakespeare presents Olivia as a character whose bliss is unattainable. Another character with unattainable bliss and marriage due to societal restraint of gender is Antonio. Antonio cares for Sebastian, Viola's twin brother, after his shipwreck, and he becomes very fond of him. When Sebastian tells Antonio that he "[doesn't] want to inconvenience [him]" (3.3.1), Antonio assures that he had "felt a sharp desire to follow [him]. It wasn't just that [he] wanted to see [him] though [he] very much did want that" (3.3.5-6). Antonio cannot express his romantic desire because society during this time did not accept homosexuality. Furthermore, he must observe as he realizes Sebastian has married Olivia. For Antonio, this play's ending seems neither to define a tragedy or a comedy because it ends in neither death nor marriage. With his character, Shakespeare further explores the triviality of the apparent line that separates tragedies from comedies because Antonio seems stuck between these two genres. Thus, Antonio is a part of both, meaning tragedies can exist within comedies.

Though the plays' depiction of love seems a tragic one because of its emotional effect on the characters, and these comedies incorporate some tragic elements into them, Shakespeare may be satirizing love and people's obsession with it. Because he has juxtaposed love's misery with a humorous facade within the language, he seems to suggest that suffering from affection is trivial, humorous, and as ridiculous as Bottom's transformation into a donkey. Titania's love for Botom greatly exaggerates the impossibility of love, so Shakespeare likely included this relationship to secure the play's effect as a satirical piece. Also, he implies that lovers often easily fall in love with somebody else, despite their melodramatic suffering, so their great suffering seems even more melodramatic than realistic. He shows this with A Midsummer Night's Dream, as the men swiftly gain a new object of their affection with a few drops of poison. He similarly parodies love with Twelfth Night, when Olivia is content that she has married Sebastian despite never having met him before and previously agonizing over his sister. In this satirical form, these plays certainly should be categorized as comedies. Still, the fact that one type of plot structurally and sometimes characteristically looks so much like its apparent opposite may unnerve the reader (or viewer), for Shakespeare does not distinguish much between amusement and unhappiness. Therefore, a reader may unfortunately discover his own feelings of melancholy seem unimportant and merely amusing to outsiders; perhaps these were Shakespeare's intentions in the first place, as he mocks love's melancholy.