Farce Or Life In “Comedy”

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31032, 12 April 1966, Page 13

Farce Or Life In “Comedy”

BY CLIFFORD WILLIAMS When I started to think about “The Comedy of Erros,” the first image which came into my mind was of Shakespeare himself.

Did he know that with this very early work he was beginning a canon of plays of incomparable magnitude? Did he know at least that the theatre was to be his destiny whether it treated him harshly or kindly? Or was he—like so many long-since forgotten Elizabethans—surrenddering to the popular pursit

of trying his hand at a play? Certainly there is no expression of startling innovation in “The Comedy.” Shakespeare followed tradition in searching for a story among the plays of classical dramatists. He accepted the custom of elevating plot and event above character and action. His versification was regular and often jingly. He wrote as a man well acquainted and well content with the existing tools and practices of his craft. He was careful not to overstretch himself.

He avoided one widely fol-

lowed tenet of Elizabethan drama the necessity for noble personages and great passions—and restrained the action of the play to that of domestic strife on a bourgeois level. Perhaps, at this level, he was not obliged to invent but could use the vein of realistic observation which

runs through even the most rarefied of his later masterpieces. Whatever went on in Shakespeare's mind, the completed “Comedy of Errors” was curiously closer in style to the plays of his Italian, French and Spanish contemporaries than to those of English writers.

Its characters resemble the stock “masks” of the Italian comedy, and their situation is complicated with all the relish of the commedia dell’arte farces. The self-delusion of their behaviour is mocked at in a way which Molina and Moliere would have approved of. Above all, Lope de Vega would have recognised the manner in which Shakespeare set their personal dilemmas against a background of moral consideration. When we speak of farce, we commonly think of curates, trousers, French window’s, banana skins, laughter, and incredibility. But farce may be given a dimension and a reality which makes it more fruitful than the most painstaking W’ork of naturalism. Shakespeare, the father of twins, could not—on a factual level—say much more than that two sets of twins afford more identification problems than one.

Shakespeare, the married man. would have to admit that it is difficult to float a marriage once it is on the rocks. But Shakespeare, the dramatist, gives us a crazy though magical Ephesus where men may re-find their brothers and find themselves, and where women may re-find their husbands and learn about themselves.

The city and people of Ephesus may be highly improbable, but they are infinitely desirable; a triumph of imagination over life.