SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, MOLIERE THE COMIC CONTRACT

By the same author

SYNGE: A Critical Study of the Plays BERNARD SHAW: A Critical View

Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere

The Comic Contract

Nicholas Grene

M MACMILLAN

© Nicholas Grene 1980

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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First published 1980 Reprinted (with alterations) 1985

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Grene Nicholas Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere 1. Jonson, Ben-Criticism and interpretation 2. Shakespeare, William-Comedies 3. Moliere-Criticism and interpretation 822' .3'09 PR2638

ISBN 978-0-333-39533-2 ISBN 978-1-349-08112-7 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-08112-7

To the memory of Daniel

Contents

Acknowledgements IX

Note on Texts and Translations Xl

Introduction Xlll

The Comic Contract 2 The Triumph of Nature 19 3 Comic Controllers 43 4 Quacks and Con men 69 5 The Language of Courtship 93 6 Monstrous Regiment 112

7 Follies and Crimes 135 8 Two Plays in Search of an Audience 163 9 Conflicting Contracts 185

Conclusion 210 Translations 216 Notes 224 Bibliography 235 Index 243

VII

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge gratefully a term's study leave from the University of Liverpool which made it possible for me to complete research for this book in Paris.

I want to thank my colleagues Philip Edwards and Sarah Kay, my mother Marjorie Grene and my wife Eleanor Grene, all of whom read my manuscript at various stages in its preparation and made very helpful comments and criticisms. I am also grateful to Joan Welford, Catherine Rees, and Annette Butler for their excellent team-typing.

Some of the material in the first chapter of this book has already appeared in Themes in Drama and is included by permission of Cambridge University Press.

N.G.

IX

Note on Texts and Translations

The texts used for the Shakespeare plays discussed in this book are those of the New Arden series, except in the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream

(Penguin) and Troilus and Cress ida (Cambridge) where New Arden editions are not yet available.* All quotations from Jonson are taken from the individual editions of the Yale Ben Jonson. The Moliere used is the two~ volume Garnier Oeuvres Completes edited by Robert Jouannay.

As this study is intended primarily for English-speaking readers, some of whom may not read French, it seemed important to include translations of the frequent quotations from Moliere. Where these are no more than a line or two, a translation or paraphrase has been incorporated into the body of the text. In the case oflonger quotations, the translations appear in a separate section at the end of the book. The versions are substantially my own; they have no claim to literary merit whatever but are intended solely to help the non-French-speaking reader follow the meaning of the lines quoted. For similar reasons I have given in translation the occasional passages quoted from French critics of Moliere.

*New Arden editions of both these plays have been published since this book was written

XI

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to pursue an idea about the relation of the comedian to his audience through the comparison of individual works by the three outstanding comic playwrights of the seventeenth century. What is planned is hopefully something more than a series of essays on Shakespeare, Jonson and Moliere, though certainly less than a general theory of comedy. In fact, one starting point for this study was a sense of dissatisfaction with comprehensive theories of comedy as such, which tend so often to be monolithic and inflexible, belying the variousness and complexity of the comic experience. Therefore, instead of beginning with a definition of comedy or discrimination between the several sub-species of the comic, I have largely set aside formal distinctions in my synoptic approach to Shakespeare, Jonson and Moliere. The net is thrown wide to include anything which has claims to be called comedy, however loosely: a brief farce (Les Precieuses Ridicules), a satire (Volpone), a Shakespearean romance (The Tempest). I have even included plays with more dubious titles to be considered within the comic genre (Dom Juan, Troilus and Cressida). The result may at times seem arbitrary in its selection of examples and eccentric in their juxtaposition. There is, however, a design which I hope will emerge in the course of the book as a whole. After an introductory analysis of comic structure in Bartholomew Fair (Chapter One), each chapter will involve the comparison of two or more plays to illustrate a variety of different patterns of comic structure and meaning. These will range from the essentially optimistic view of man in society usually associated with romantic comedy (Chapters Two and Three), through the more satiric stance of what may be roughly categorised as comedies of manners (Chapters Four, Five and Six). to a radical scepticism found in plays bordering on other dramatic genres.

The juxtaposition of apparently odd bedfellows can, I believe, result in new insights into the individual plays compared and their authors; I hope that this book may be of some value to people primarily interested in anyone of the three comedians. However, it is mainly intended as an exploratory method to find terms of reference sufficiently open to include the different sorts of comedy with which Shakespeare,Jonson and Moliere are identified. All three are major comic playwrights who lived and worked within

Xlii

XIV Introduction

seventy years of each other, and their plays are central to that continuous European tradition of comedy which runs from Machiavelli in sixteenth century Italy through to, say, Beaumarchais in eighteenth century France.! Yet they are seldom if ever compared. Romantic comedy represented by Shakespeare, the moral satiric comedy of Jonson, Moliere's neo-classical social comedy, are considered as quite separate phenomena. If Shakespeare is compared with Jonson it is nearly always for the purposes of blank contrast, often to Jonson's disadvantage. 2 Moliere has very occasionally been compared with Shakespeare, but without much conviction that such an approach is of value except as an analysis of dissimilarity. 3 Jonson and Moliere have been considered together even more rarely, partly no doubt because Jonson is not particularly widely known or highly thought of outside the English-speaking world. 4 As far as I am aware, this is the first critical study to be centrally concerned with a comparison of all three.

Very different assumptions about the nature of comedy underlie modern criticism of Shakespeare, Jonson and Moliere, so different that the term comedy itself used to denote a common genre almost ceases to have meaning. What comedy is, what comedy does, what comedy means, the answers to these questions change radically depending on whether they are

answered by the critic of Shakespeare, Jonson, or Moliere. With titles such as Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, What You Will, Shakespeare seems to offer his comedies as pure entertainment, untroubled by neo-classical notions of didacticism. Critics have tended, therefore, to try to locate the meaning of Shakespearean comedy in the form of the comic action itself rather than in an identifiable moral lesson to be drawn from it. Northrop Frye, for instance, relates the comic rhythm to its origins in ritual and defines the pattern of Shakespearean comedy as the progress from an 'anti-comic society, a social organisation blocking and opposed to the comic drive' through a Saturnalian period of sexual licence or confusion, to the discovery of identity in a new comic society represented in the celebration of marriage. 5 This connection between comedy and festivity is given detailed historical substance in the work ofC. L. Barber and others who have shown in Shakespeare's comedies the development of patterns characteristic of traditional holida y sports and pastimes. 6 From this point of view, the release of a temporary period of allowed misrule leads to the deeper and more secure social order of the ending. The new society created by the denouement even has transcendental significance for some critics who concentrate on Shakespeare's pastoral comedy and its idyllic images of paradise. 7 Still another way of finding meaning in the comic form is to analyse the ironic multiplicity of different sorts of experience in the plays. The very heterogeneousness of Shakespeare's comedies, their mixture of the fantastic

Introduction xv

and the realistic, the romantic and anti-romantic, to whicbJonson so much objected, contributes to a deliberate effect of enlarging the imagination both of characters and audience. To critics with this view of Shakespearean comedy, it is the constant shift in dramatic mode, rather than a single period of licensed disorder and confusion, which brings the characters through a beneficial alienation to a deeper understanding of themselves and their situation. 8

Jonsonian criticism has understandably remained much closer to the neo­classical concept of comedy, and has generally been concerned to justify Jonson's own claim for the moral effect of his work. Beginning with L. C. Knights's study, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 9 much of the best and most illuminating analysis of the plays has been devoted to the relation between comic technique and moral vision. Jonson, it has been argued, upholds a high ideal of order and truth, traditional and conservative, by the elaborate ridicule of its opposite. 1 0 Though at an individual level we may not be taught by The Alchemist to avoid the excesses of Sir Epicure Mammon, we are confirmed in the general principles by which Mammon is condemned. This moral view of Jonson may be said to represent critical orthodoxy, but several writers have questioned whether he is as monolithic as the moralists would suggest. Jonas Barish, among others, has argued that Jonson moved away from the stern didacticism of his earlier plays, towards a less austere, in some ways more Shakespearean, form of comedy. 11 InJohnJ. Enck's view, Jonson's whole career represents a continuing series of experiments in the development of all available varieties of comic form. 1 2

The criticism of Moliere illustrates most strikingly of all the debate on comic structure and meaning. A longstanding critical tradition identified the signifICance of Moliere's plays in terms of the ideas of his time. For some he was a radical, associated with the tradition of seventeenth-century freethink­ing and a rationalist 'philosophy of nature'; 13 for others his comedies illustrated a vaguer and more moderate ideal of the 'juste milieu'. 14 Paul Benichou argued for a Moliere committed to the aristocratic values of the court; 15 John Cairncross proposed on the contrary a 'Moliere bourgeois et libertin'. 16 However, in the last thirty years there has been what Molieristes still think of as a revolution in criticism, started by the work ofW. G. Moore and Rene Bray. 1 7 They attempted to liberate Moliere from association with one ideological position or another, to remind us that he was first of all a man of the theatre, and that his comedies are best analysed in terms of dramatic technique rather than moral or philosophical statement. Though the historical tradition of ideological interpretation has continued, the concern with comic structure has dominated Moliere studies since the Second World War. 18 The significance of the comic structure, however, is as much a matter

xvi Introduction

for debate as ever. W. G. Moore was inclined to see a general theatrical exploitation of the gap between social mask and human reality. Other critics, most outstandingly Jacques Guicharnaud, have suggested that the irrationalism of Moliere's comic characters reveals an even more basic absurdity in the human situation which takes us beyond what we normally understand by comedy. 19

Modern critics of Shakespeare, Jonson and Moliere share a concern with the relation of comic meaning and structure; there are interesting parallels betweeen the controversy over Moliere as man of the theatre or as man of ideas and the debate in Jonson criticism between those who stress his sustained moral attitude and those who see him as a varying comic playwright. Yet the terms of analysis used, the basic approach to any of the three authors, could scarcely be transferred to the other two. In looking for a concept of comedy sufficiently flexible to accommodate all three, however, my aim is not to discover a single pattern of comic meaning, nor yet a rhythm or structure of comic action applicable alike to Shakespeare,Jonson and Moliere. In fact, it is a main thesis of my argument that no such comprehensive view of the form and meaning of comedy is possible. General theorists have often found it necessary to attempt some cosmic explanation, whether psychological, social, philosophical, or anthropolo­gical for the significance of comedy. Yet, although complicated taxonomies of the comic are demonstrated, in many cases it would seem that the general theory has really one main tradition of comedy, or even one author, at its centre. Thus Meredith's definition of the comic spirit would allow only Aristophanes, Menander, and Moliere to be pure comedians. 20 Although Bergson's concept of the mechanical as the source of the comic is ingeniously extended to a wide range of different forms of comedy, it seems to ap­ply most appropriately to farce and the comedy of situation. 21 For Northrop Frye, even in The Anatomy of Criticism where he analyses a spectrum of comic form from satire to romance, the basic archetypes deriving from Roman and Greek New Comedy are most centrally represented by Shakespeare. 2 2

There can be no doubt that comic structures and themes are traditional, yet they may vary radically not only from one playwright to another, but from play to play within the works of a single comedian. What remains constant, I would argue, is not any basic structure of meaning, but rather the relationship between the comedian and his audience. The audience at a comedy agree to see things in a certain light, agree to accept the terms of reference which the comic structure establishes and which is frequently recognised as traditional. But this view of the comic world is not fixed and universal. It is not always, for instance, socially conservative and reactionary,

Introduction XVIl

as some comic theorists would suggest who insist on the conformist effect of comedy.23 Nor, on the other hand, need it be progressive or anti­reactionary, as another school of thought would have it.24 It is not to be identified with the attitude which one or other class or creed of the audience might normally be expected to adopt outside the theatre. Rather it is a hypothetical agreement of comedian and audience to share assumptions for the duration of the comedy which they might well not share at any other time. It is to illustrate this agreement and its varying forms that the present study is designed.

One final caution is necessary to avoid misconception. I need to explain what I mean by the audience of comedy, or rather what I do not mean. I do not mean the audience in the theatre for whom the play was first written and before whom it was first performed, nor yet the succession of various audi­ences who have seen it since. If there is such a thing as the Platonic form of an audience of which any and every actual audience is an imitation, then it is with such an ideal audience that this book is concerned. That sounds very much like a literary rather than a dramatic point of view. 'Theatres of the mind', so common in earlier criticism of drama, have come to be suspected as an attempt by the literary critic to amplify his or her opinions about a printed text into the reaction of a whole auditorium. No-one is now likely to forget that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Moliere were all three men of the theatre, working under the pressures of a demanding practical profession. Through­out this book I have tried where possible to take into account theatrical considerations which may have shaped the comedies discussed and to make use of what information is available about their original staging. My views have clearly often been influenced by productions of the plays I have seen myself. Yet a dramatic structure, above all a comedy, does imply an audience which is something other than the assortment of spectators it happens to meet with in a given theatre. Any serious playwright writes not only with his actual public in mind - ajoke for the groundlings here, a literary allusion for the gentlemen there - but also for a notional audience (to avoid the ambiguous term 'ideal') to whom the aesthetic design of the whole might be apparent. It is the shared and agreed response which the comedian seems to expect from his notional audience that I shall be concerned to define.