Alexander Leggatt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean
Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 237pp,
ISBN 0521779421
This is one of the latest additions to the Cambridge Companion series,
with thirteen chapters on Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Alexander
Leggatt. Each contributor has selected his or her own set of Shakespeare
plays to discuss, sometimes broadening discussions to works by
Shakespeare’s contemporaries to provide further contextualisation.
Topics include theories of comedy, Roman comedy, Italian influences on
Shakespeare, Elizabethan comedy, popular festivity, forms of confusion,
love and courtship, laughing at ‘others’, comedy and sex, language and
comedy, sexual disguise, matters of state, and Shakespeare’s
experimentation with romantic form.
Leggatt begins in his Preface by discussing the disposability of
comedy in our modern world, ‘packaged and processed like bread and
milk’. He cites the recent film Notting Hill as a legacy of ancient and
Shakespearean comedy, with its development of story, its characters
taken through periods of confusion, and its harmonious ending. 10 things
I hate about you, a modern movie reworking of The Taming of the Shrew,
is also described as a legacy of Shakespearean comedy due to the
interplay between love and money, despite the huge differences between
the play and the film.
Highlights include David Galbraith’s attempt to chart a theory of
comedy from the ancients, and Louise George Clubb’s case for
Shakespeare as ‘ransacker’ of Italian stories. Galbraith points out that the
genre of comedy is ‘notoriously resistant to theorization’. He outlines
classical arguments, including the medical explanations of laughter by
Hippocrates and Galen, and the theories of Aristotle, Cicero, Euthanthius
and Donatus. He detects stock types of ancient comedy in Shakespeare’s
work, including Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘the old man
scold’) and Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well (‘the soldier boast’).
The mingling of duke and clowns in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the
deus ex machina towards the end of As You Like It, the threat of violent
death in The Merchant of Venice, and the violation of the unities in The
Winter’s Tale are further examples provided by Gilbraith of the legacy of
ancient comedy theory in Shakespeare’s work. Clubb identifies the
‘mery bookes of Italie’ that could have influenced the playwright, whilst
pointing out that the books were not necessarily Italian in origin, their
sources lost in the distance of antiquity and Indo-European folklore.
Performance-based Commedia dell’Arte and Commedia Erudita are also
discussed as Shakespearean sources.
The companion is invaluable to scholars of Shakespeare, early
modern drama, and theories of comedy. Leggatt’s reassurance that none
of the contributors were prescribed certain texts to discuss ensures that
the volume is wide-ranging and eclectic in style, and its appeal is farreaching.
Ben Spiller
University of Warwick