Can Shakespeare’s comedies ever really be funny now?
In the 21st century, the comedies present untold challenges, says Ben Lawrence
Shakespearean comedy is a funny thing. It still forms the backbone of our theatrical repertoire, and yet it’s unlikely that The Comedy of Errors or As You Like It would ever have us rolling in the aisles. “Sweetest nut hath sourest rind. Such a nut is Rosalind.” Hilarious. Nevertheless, if you attend any production you are bound to hear peals of laughter. Above and beyond the virtues of the particular production, there’s the terror of not getting the jokes or, indeed, the sheer smugness of getting the jokes.
Shakespeare’s comedy has had many critics, including Kingsley Amis, who dismissed the jokes in Twelfth Night as terrible, and Richard Eyre, who has directed much of the canon and confessed in 2015: “It’s true that a lot of Shakespeare’s jokes aren’t very good. Comedy dates very quickly.”
Certainly, the distancing effect of history is the principal reason as to why audiences can sometimes find it hard to connect with Shakespeare as comedy. Fiona Laird, whose new RSC production of The Merry Wives of Windsor has just opened at Stratford-upon-avon, is mindful of the problem. She is getting in the comic spirit with a bold production that transposes the action to modernday Essex. While visual rejuvenation is one thing, the barrier of language is harder to overcome.
“A lot of words have changed their meaning and don’t work for that reason,” she says. “I have cut the first two pages of the printed play because we don’t understand heraldry, for example. I have cut quite a lot [overall] – 20 per cent of the actual words – but I don’t think I have lost the meaning of the play. Words may change their meaning, but humans are still funny for the same reason, and the situations are still funny.”
Certainly, slapstick is a handy device that can hide a multitude of difficulties. If in doubt about the archaic language, then a well-engineered pratfall should save the audience from dozing off. Though you have to tread carefully. An otherwise excellent production of King Lear, currently in the West End, was marred slightly for me by the direction of the Fool, who pointed to a certain part of his anatomy every time he was making a sex gag in order to compensate for language lost in the mists of time.
Indeed, if you are a seasoned theatregoer, the most obviously comic passages or characters in Shakespeare are often the ones that you learn to dread. Has there ever been a hilarious Dogberry, the constable beleaguered by malapropisms in Much Ado About Nothing, or a mirth-inducing Costard, the constantly punning country bumpkin of Love’s Labour’s Lost?
Helen Barr, a professor of English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, believes the trouble lies in seeing them simply as comedy characters; rather, these fools have a wider and subversive function. “They are presented as not as educated as other people in the play, but they are part of the social texture,” says Barr. “They are brilliant at pointing out the pretentiousness of their betters.”
There is often also a savagery to the humour in Shakespeare that can feel as uncomfortable as the puns. Laird has had to address this in The Merry Wives of Windsor in a scene in which Ford hits the Fat Woman of Brentford (actually Falstaff in disguise). She has turned it more into a Keystone Kops kind of kerfuffle because: “We don’t live in a society where [a man hitting a woman] is funny, thank goodness.”
“You have to think of the cruelty of the time in which Shakespeare was writing,” says Laird. “There was bear-baiting, public hanging, people were made to wear placards if they had committed a sin. The bar was higher – they could take far more cruelty than we can.”
Sometimes the subject matter of Shakespeare’s comedy becomes dark. It is hard to sidestep the problems of The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio’s treatment of Katherina lingers like a bad smell long after the play has ended. “I can’t cope with that play,” says Laird. “It seems to me that Shakespeare is laughing at a woman who has ideas above her station. She is under his foot at the end.”
Changing social attitudes have rendered several works impossible to play as comedy, none more so than The Merchant of Venice, which Barr has had to teach. She says you have to confront its difficulties. “If you don’t look at things that are uncomfortable, you erase a whole period of history in which Jews were treated abominably. To historicise it helps to understand the context in which the play could have been written.”
This begs the question of whether Shakespeare’s comedy in the 21st century survives best when it is seen in non-comic terms. Make As You Like It a play about sustainable living and you can avoid much of its weirdness – the unlikely romantic attachments and unfunny proclamations of Touchstone; play Twelfth Night as a piece about social exclusion and the treatment of Malvolio, though still troubling, becomes a dramatic issue rather than an uncomfortable platform for humour.
A play such as The Comedy of Errors, with its maddening mistaken identity issues, can be reinvigorated in a sobering fashion. As Barr says: “It is possible to play that with its double set of twins and the townsfolk constantly accusing somebody of being somebody else as being a nightmare. It is an exploration of the dissolution of a sense of self. A way of bringing that home is to set it in an era of virtual reality and use CGI to negotiate people’s sense of the divided self. Are they a terrestrial self or are they a digital self?”
Of course, there is still much to enjoy in Shakespeare’s comedies. And, for all the gags that can be said to have
‘Words may change their meaning, but humans are still funny for the same reason’
been lost in translation from the Elizabethan stage, sometimes their hilarity remains timeless.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps the most perfect of Shakespeare’s comedies, the idea of a fairy queen being enamoured of an ass or of lovers falling for the wrong people under the influence of love potions still has intoxicating comic potential. And then there are the Bottom jokes – we will surely never tire of those.