Shakespeare and the Comics

Abstract

Two contrary tendencies can be found in Shakespeare’s treatment of the integrity of dramatic illusion. Despite his audiences’ evident ability to overleap breaks in the continuity of the dramatic narrative, he seems, for a time at least, to have concentrated upon controlling the excesses of his clowns; secondly, he developed in a very subtle manner the breaking of illusion in ways that would, under his control, enrich or intensify the dramatic experience and, paradoxically ‘stress a deeper reality’.¹ These tendencies have two things in common. First, they reveal the desire of the great artist to hold as much of his art in his control as he can. Second, they are both concerned with the relationship of the play world and the real world and the way that the dramatic illusion is breached. For a clown to overstep the mark when ‘some necessary point in the play’ is then to be observed is vile ‘and shows a pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it’, said Hamlet and so, I think it can be shown, Shakespeare. Yet in a variety of ways Shakespeare breaks the integrity of the dramatic illusion, either by reminding us of the ‘real’ world, or that we are in a theatre watching a fiction, or by juxtaposing different kinds of dramatic illusion. Thus, in As You Like It not only the name Jaques, but the reference to Master What-ye-call’t directly remind us of the real world, and the Duke’s anatomising of Jaques does so indirectly:

Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin. For thou thyself hast been a libertine, As sensual as the brutish sting itself; And all th’ embossed sores and headed evils That thou with license of free foot hast caught Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world. (ii.vii.64–9)