The Genres of

Shakespeares
Plays

 We organize most knowledge by creating

categories.
We begin to know an object by comparing it
with other objects or by contrasting it with still
more.
Names give us ways of thinking about things
and, in the case of literature, they also give us
ways of appreciating them and arguing about
them.
For literature, the principal term used in
systems of classification is genre.
The major literary genres are prose narrative
(novels), drama (plays), and poetry.

 Literary criticism essentially began with these

very distinctions
Aristotles Poetics - outlined the differing
origins of com-edy and tragedy and described
their contrasting effects. His remarks on the
history and theory of drama were highly
influential in the Renaissance.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries were
aware of genre because they often made generic
identifications in the titles of their plays - The
Tragedy of King Richard II.
Seven years after Shakespeare's death, his
former colleagues assembled his plays in one
large
volume
called
Master
William

 We usually refer to this book as the 'First Folio',

because it was the first collection of Shakespeare's plays
and because it was printed in a large (folio-sized) volume.
in the table of contents, the 'Catalogue,the plays are
divided into three groups, fourteen of them represented
as 'Comedies', ten as 'Histories', and eleven as
'Tragedies'.

 While Shakespeare allegedly wrote 39 plays

either in sole authorship or in collaboration, John
Heminges and Henry Condell, his colleagues
and editors, included 36 in the First Folio, of which
18 including such plays as Macbeth and Twelfth
Night would have never reached us were it not for
the First Folio. The remaining 18 including such
plays as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream
had been previously printed in quartos (small,
single-volume editions ).

I. Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and

tragedies
Genre identification carries with it certain
expectations. A work given a generically specific
name, like The Comedy of Errors, is usually
expected to behave like other specimens of that
genre and to adhere to conventions traditionally
associated with it.
Renaissance readers of Aristotles classification
of genres followed his observations as if they
were rules.
Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (1595) complained that some English playwrights

In fact, few playwrights in Elizabethan and

Jacobean England were strict in observing ancient
regulations about the genres.
No matter how familiar they were with Aristotle,
they responded to other influences as well,
including native traditions from medieval England
and their own innovations.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was a
commercial business, and it adapted to, catered
to, and also expanded the tastes and interests of
its audiences.
the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare's
time were differentiated more in terms of plot
resolution than of social status. Comedies ended

 `Histories- a term that Aristotle never

employed to define a dramatic genre.
The English history was an Elizabethan
invention used with reference to a dramatic
subject matter rather than a dramatic mode
per se.
Prose writing about the history of England
was popular in Renaissance England as a
medium through which a national identity
was created and refined.
Shakespeare was one of a number of
playwrights who recognized the good source
material available in the English chronicles
and who turned this well-liked subject matter into

 the boundaries between tragedy, comedy, and

English history were not so meticulously
maintained in the Renaissance as the Catalogue
may suggest.
Some plays were given different generic
identifications at different times.
We think of both Richard II and Richard III as
English history plays, and both were catalogued
that way in the First Folio. But in their earlier,
quarto versions they were called The Tragedy of
King Richard the Second (1597) and The Tragedy
of King Richard the Third (1597).
Renaissance books were generally sold as a
loose collection of pages, and purchasers could

 in quarto King Lear was titled Master William

Shakespeare his True Chronicle History of the
Life and Death of King Lear and his Three
Daughters, with the Unfortunate Life of Edgar,
Son and Heir to the Earl of Gloucester and his
Sullen and Assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam.
As It Was Played before the King's Majesty at
Whitehall upon St. Stephen's night in
Christmas Holiday by his Majesty's Servants
Playing Usually at the Globe on the Bankside
(1608).
This title page touches on history ('true
chronicle history'), tragedy ('life and death'),
and comedy ('sullen and assumed humour').

The Folio generally confined itself to such short

titles, perhaps because it was not trying to
market any play individually the Folio
suppressed some of the generic ambiguities of
earlier printed versions of the plays.
Despite the regularizations it imposed in both its
play titles and its Catalogue, however, the Folio
did not eliminate all generic controversy for
Shakespeare's readers.
Cymbeline is catalogued in the First Folio as a
tragedy and given the name The Tragedy of
Cymbeline, but today we think of it as a comedy.

II. Theories of Comedy. Romantic Comedies

For Shakespeare's contemporaries, a 'comedy'
could be recognized by a relatively simple
formula: comedies end in marriage, while
tragedies end in death.
Yet Shakespeare's comedies radically
complicate this formula in a variety of ways.
10 romantic comedies: The Comedy of
Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming
of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer
Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado
About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As
You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

 3 'problem plays' or 'late comedies' : Troilus

and Cressida, Measure for Measure and All's Well
That Ends Well
4 romances' Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's
Tale, and The Tempest.
This lecture will consider the origins and nature
of the 'romantic comedies'.
The romantic comedies are termed 'romantic' in
part because their plots and major themes
involve love and desire.
They are related to the so-called 'romances' in
that both types of play have similar plots,
typically involving some frustration of true
love, a journey by a lover, improbable or even
magical events, and a resolution in marriage

 The difference between the two types of play

is partly a matter of degree: in the romances, the
journeys are more difficult and strange, gods may
enter the action, deaths may in fact occur and
plot and character improbabilities are often
much greater than in the romantic comedies.
a) Theories of comedy
) Comedy was considered a 'lower' genre than
tragedy, just as tragedy was thought 'lower'
than epic.
) Yet comedies were extremely popular on the
early modern English stage
) George Whetstone's definition of comedy in

'grave old men should instruct: young men

should show the imperfections of youth:
strumpets should be lascivious, boys unhappy:
and clowns should speak disorderly:
intermingling all these actions, in such sort, as
the grave matter may instruct: and the
pleasant, delight'.
This prescription was surely more honoured in
the breach than in the observance. Many
Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare
foremost among them, ignored the
boundaries between the serious and the
playful, blurring the supposed lines of genre
between tragedy and comedy either
infiltration of comic elements into higher
genres such as tragedy or comedies infiltrated

 Shakespeare's romantic comedies do try to end in

marriage, or the promise of it; the expectation of such
traditional endings was so great that when Shakespeare
violated the principle in Love's Labour's Lost, one of the
characters, Biron, commented on the oddity:
BIRON: Our wooing doth not end like an old play. Jack
hath not Jill.
These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
KING: Come, sir, it wants a twelve month an' a day;
And then 'twill end.
BIRON: That's too long for a play. (5.2.851-5)
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck invoked the same
fairy tale to mark the promise that this play would end
properly:
Jack shall have Jill,
Naught shall go ill ... ... and all shall be well. (3.3.457)

Thus, all of these comedies show lovers initially

unable to fulfil their 'natural' desires for a
particular lover: either the destined characters
are separated by some external event (shipwreck,
banishment) or one of them suffers from some
internal bar (melancholy, anxiety).
These 'blocking' conditions (a term used by the
critic Northrop Frye to indicate forces that
frustrate the satisfaction of desire) must be
overcome, at which point the 'right' characters
can come together happilyor, as in Love's
Labour's Lost, the possibility is deferred.
In a number of plays, the blocking action is
embodied in a harsh or rigid law (as in The
Comedy of Errors or in Love's Labour's Lost),

The marriages toward which the romantic comedies

move are both the actual ceremonies, in the modern
sense in As You Like It, not one but four couples are to
be married at the end of the play and in some cases a
restoration of a sundered (separated) marriage or love.
There are also social analogues to marriage, in
which strained family relationships are healed, as in the
reconciliation of the brothers in As You Like It .
A 'comedy' is a play with a certain kind of plot, then;
there may be comical elementsmoments of humourin
a play, but humour alone does not produce a comedy. The
happy (or promised) ending, after the characters
overcome obstacles, does.
The comedies also often include satiric voices, at
times self-directed, in figures like Jaques in As You Like It
and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and the mood at the very
end of the comedies can be reflective, as in the

 One other aspect of the plots of romantic comedies:

there is never just a single focus on a single
relationship, but multiple tracks of interest followed in
detail.
Every set of lovers is surrounded by characters and
situations that mirror their own: ageing parents,
clowns and fools, parodic versions of romantic lovers
(Silvius in As You Like It, Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night),
extremes of comic celebration (Feste and Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night) and comic denial (Jaques in As You Like It
and Malvolio in Twelfth Night).
In some of the plays there are full-fledged secondary
plots or even a play-within-the-play (Love's Labour's
Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream) that reflect on the
actions of the main plot.
Some of the comedies are associated with particular
occasions of ritual festive activity: A Midsummer Night's
Dream is associated both with Midsummer Night's Eve,

 These plays, along with Love's Labour's Lost, The

Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It, were described by
the critic C. L. Barber as Shakespeare's 'festive
comedies' because of their associations with such
holidays specifically, and more generally with the values
of festivity, which seem central to comedy.
Critic Northrop Frye noted that the comedies usually
include an actual or symbolic journey to a 'green
world', a place associated with nature (by contrast
with a corrupted court or city), where a healthy
confusion of values and relationships might occur,
leading to the restoration of a community to harmony and
peace.
These structural conceptions of comedy have been
enormously useful in criticism, though they have also at
times made the comedies seem more alike than they are,

b) Contexts of comedy
After many years of interpreting the romantic comedies
through the categories of structure, character, or theme,
critics have in recent years also begun to situate these
plays in terms of their historical and cultural
contexts. (new historicism, feminism).
Thus, the romantic comedies are now seen to be in part
concerned with tyranny and the nature of patriarchal rule,
particularly within the family.

The romantic comedies have also been seen to

reflect early modern concerns about such
material matters as:
)the enclosure of common fields (As You Like
It),
)the social and economic plight of younger

-the nature of the theatre in the early modern

period (Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer
Night's Dream),
-the Elizabethan encounter with religious
otherness (The Merchant of Venice);
-the early modern subject's relation to Queen
Elizabeth (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Merry Wives of Windsor), and, above all
anxieties about gender and theatre.
while Shakespearian tragedies tend to centre
on the actions of a single male protagonist (with
notable exceptions like Juliet and Cleopatra), the
comedies more often present the figure of a
young woman as embodying the plays'
central themes or values. Some critics following
Northrop Frye simply asserted that tragedy was

 reunion, birth or rebirth, marriage, 'natural'

harmony, happinessvalues which were (without
much
self-analysis)
characterized
as
stereotypically `female'; an opposite set of
values,
associated
with
tragedy,
were
stereotyped as 'male'.
Shakespeare's romantic comedies stage some
of the most articulate, forceful, selfpossessed female characters in all of drama,
(Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew, the four ladies in Love's
Labour's Lost, Beatrice in Much Ado About
Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice,
Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth
Night.

Whichever position one took, the result was a

usefully heightened attention to these powerful
and interesting characters.
The romantic comedies were once called, in an
influential work of criticism published in 1962,
'Shakespeare's Happy Comedies'. The plays were
considered, almost entirely apart from their
material and cultural contexts, largely in terms of
themes such as forgiveness, love's wealth, and so
on. In the past two decades, as the comedies
have been historically contextualized, they have
come to be seen as not nearly as 'happy' as once
thought. The happy ending in marriage is now
also seen as a cultural fantasy, and the origins of
that fantasy have been sought in terms of

ORIGINS
The
plots,
characters,
and
themes
of
Shakespeare's comedies can be traced with some
completeness;
Shakespeare's originality as a playwright lay
not so much in his invention of something out of
nothing, as in taking something familiar and
making it new.
With the comedies, Shakespeare's sources
may be broadly defined into two categories,
the classical and the popular, which will be
examined in that order.
In Hamlet, Polonius notes that the travelling
troupe of actors relies on classical precedents:

The plays of the Roman playwright Plautus

were very well-known in early modern England,
both through the grammar school curriculum,
where they were read and translated, and
through early imitations and retellings of Plautine
stories.
Plautus's influence can be seen in all of
Shakespeare's comedies, but four of them in
particular are indebted to Plautus as an initial
model: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth
Night.
All of these plays' plots turn on transformations
of identity, through trickery and deceit rather
than magic; each involves multiple disguises, and

Other comedies derive their stories, in part,

from Shakespeare's readings in prose romances,
such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona (from Jorge
de Montemayor's Diana) and As You Like It (from
Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde.)
The heritage of the romantic comedies can also
be traced back to popular culture.
The comedies (and all the other plays, in fact)
owe much to the native tradition of medieval
drama, such as the Morality plays.
The tricky servants from Plautine comedy, for
example, are frequently fused with characteristics
from the Vice figure of the late-medieval
Morality plays.

HUMOUR
The popular tradition also included a certain
amount of unscripted, improvisatory humour,
which found its way, often indirectly, into the
Elizabethan playtexts.
The Elizabethan period witnessed the rise of
three of the greatest clown/actors in
theatrical history: Richard Tarlton, Will Kemp and
Robert Armin.
Will Kemp joined the Chamberlain's Men,
Shakespeare's company, around 1593-4. Soon
parts were written specifically for Kemp to
performLance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Costard in Love's Labour's Lost, Bottom in A

In late 1599, Kemp left Shakespeare's company

and was succeeded by a different kind of
clown, Robert Armin, already a well-known
actor and writer of anecdotes by 1600; he
eventually became a playwright himself.
Armin's acting talents were evidently much
different from Kemp's, with the result that
Shakespeare no longer wrote parts like Bottom;
instead, he began writing roles for the jester,
such as Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in
Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All's Well That Ends
Well, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and,
perhaps most memorable, the Fool in King Lear,
all of which Armin probably performed.

Shakespeare's plays have sometimes been

criticized, even by his immediate contemporaries,
for their willingness to indulge in what is said to
be 'low' humourthe humour of the clown,
which is often bawdy (vulgar), full of bad jokes
and awful puns, dependent on physical humour.
Yet the clowns are never irrelevant to the
plays they are in, for they often serve to
parody the themes of the main plots: Bottom
falls in love with the Fairy Queen in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, for example, Dogberry unearths
the sinister plot in Much Ado About Nothing, and
Lance and his dog Crab reflect his master Proteus
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

This 'low' humour, which Shakespeare seemed

to love, puzzled some of his contemporariesthe
rival playwright Ben Jonson offered several
criticisms of Shakespeare's dramaturgyand
offended most of Shakespeare's editors and
critics in the eighteenth century.
Low humour was especially disparaged, often
dismissed as a commercial playwright's stooping
to 'play to the groundlings' (those who paid the
least, to stand on the 'ground' at the Globe).
However, the theoretical writings of Mikhail
Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, among others, have
taught critics in recent years new ways to read
what seem to be marginal elements and
connect
them
to
traditionally
central

For instance, attention to such elements of the

plays helps link Shakespeare's romantic comedies
to other Renaissance literature, such as the work
of the French writer, Francois Rabelais (who died
in 1553).

DESIRE
Shakespearian romantic comedy, at its core, is
fuelled by desire.
The central plots as well as the low are driven
by erotic energies which cross the spectra from
heteroerotic to homoerotic, from platonic and
elevated to openly sexual and low, from
Petrarchan cliches to innovative surprises .
The plays feature brilliant young women (who
are actually male actors) and not-so-brilliant
young men, stereotyped conventional lovers, and
fresh, inventive characters who are given an
astonishing illusion of interiority.

The suggestive layerings of the plays' representations

of romantic love are perhaps best encapsulated in As
You Like It.
The character Rosalind, performed by a boy actor, has
put on a male disguise as 'Ganymede', who pretends to
be 'Rosalind' in order to woo the love-sick Orlando as a
way of 'curing' his love.
Comedies often parodic. In the following quotation,
when Orlando promises to love his beloved 'For ever and
a day', Rosalind (still in disguise) replies,
Say a day without the ever.
No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when
they wed.
Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when
they are wives. (4.1.80-92, 123-7)

Rosalind's comic wisdom here works hard to deflate

poetic hyperbole ('For ever and a day') and romantic

That is, they are fictions which culture has

accepted.
But then 'Rosalind' herself is also one of
those `lies'; somewhere beneath all the layers
of performance is the boy actor, and the play's
representation of a maturing heterosexual love is
at the same time complicated by the suggestions
of homoerotic desire: is Orlando attracted to
Rosalind or to her disguise as `Ganymede'
(which was a slang term for a young male
homosexual)?
Shakespeare staged his own version of such
tragical romantic stories as that of Hero and
Leander in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers'
lives and deaths followed the same course as the

Night's Dream, when he has his mechanicals put

on a truly wretched performance of 'A tedious
brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love
Thisbe: very tragical mirth' (5-1.56-7).
The exact same plot of young lovers, in
frustration and despair, who take their own
lives, can be either tragic or comicas you
like it, or what you will, it depends on how
you look at it.
Comic death, as seen in the play-within-the play
in Dream, is linked to real death through the
Elizabethan pun on the verb 'to die', which meant
both the physical extinction of the body but also
sexual intercourse.

Rosalind points out that every April is followed

by a December: there is a springtime of romantic
love, but there is also always winter to follow.
Mutability and death are facts of nature, but
romantic comedy aspires to transcend such
mundane facts even as it acknowledges their
inescapable reality.

FURTHER READING
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984). This book is the classic study of the
carnivalesque in relation to society and literature.
Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic
Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1959). This book relates the comedies to specific
occasions of social festivity in early modern England.
Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). This book considers the
comedies in relation to ideas of metamorphosis, particularly through
Ovid's works.
Elam, Keir. Shakespeare's Universe ofDiscourse: Language-Games in
the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). This
book, with special emphasis on Love's Labour's Lost, closely
examines language in the comedies.
Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism,
Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991). This book examines the comedies through
various aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development o
Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia