Shakespearean Comedy

Patterson provides a neat summary of three popular theories of festive comedy. All attempt to locate the play socially, in some setting of festivity. First, some suggest that Shakespeare paid a compliment to Elizabeth since she was in the original audience, an audience for a noble wedding, alluded to in 5.1.369-72. Second, CL Barber famously linked the comedies to popular festivities of inversion and misrule. Theseus makes a passing reference to Maytime celebrations (4.1.135-6 – odd in a “Midsummer” play), and other comedies refer to the inversions of popular Christmas celebration: “the lord of Misrule festivities primarily associated with the twelve days of Christmas were secularized versions of the religious Feast of Fools, which enacted the Christian inversions of exalting the low and humbling the proud.”

For Barber, “all of these festive or folk elements in Shakespeare’s plays were part of a cultural migration in which the archaic and amateur forms of dramatic presentation and ritual were absorbed by the mature national theater.” Barber himself wrote, “Shakespeare’s theater was taking over on a professional and everyday basis functions which until his time had largely been performed by amateurs on holiday. And he wrote at a moment when the educated part of society was modifying a ceremonial, ritualistic conception of human life to create a historical, psychological conception. His drama, indeed, was an important agency in this transformation . . . . In making drama out of rituals of state, Shakespeare makes clear their meaning as social and psychological conflict, as history. So too with the rituals of pleasure, or misrule, as against rule: his comedy presents holiday magic as imagination, games as expressive gestures.” Thus, the festivity was ultimately incorporated into the existing structures of society. Patterson sees a similar dynamic in the work of Victor Turner, particularly in his early writing, where he notes that “cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox”; the disruptions of liminality underscore the regularities of everyday hierarchy.

Third, Patterson examines the possibility that “popular festival forms and inversion rituals were actually subversive in intent and function all along.” Drawing on Bakhtin, she notes that the lower body, the buttocks, and the genitals provide the main patterns of imagery in comedy, and the point is “to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better . . . . Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.” When Shakespeare enacts a play with a character named Bottom, and includes bawdy humor from the lower parts of the body, his play really is subversive, because the highborn who laugh along are being lowered as they laugh: “In Bakhtin’s terms, the boundary between courtly and popular entertainment is broached by the material grotesque, by the laughter that drives the festive imagination down to the lower bodily stratum.”