How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (14 page)

And company of men
.

And now we know that Olivia is virtuous, that people speak well of her, that her brother died (remember, Viola’s brother is also presumed dead), and that she has sworn off men because she is in mourning for her father and her brother. At which point, Viola gets an idea:

O, that I served that lady
,

As the greatest literary authority of the eighteenth century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, observed in his
Notes on Shakespeare
in 1765:

[At this point,] Viola seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation: she is thrown by shipwreck on an unknown coast, hears that the prince is a bachelor, and resolves to supplant the lady whom he courts.

The Captain replies that Olivia would never agree to it:
CAPTAIN

That were hard to compass
[accomplish]

Because she will admit no kind of suit
,

No, not the Duke’s
.

So the ever-resourceful Viola comes up with
another
idea:

I prithee
[pray thee]—
and I’ll pay thee bounteously—

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke
.

Conceal me what I am

This could be the rallying cry for virtually all of Shakespeare’s comedies, filled as they are with disguises, ruses, mistaken identities, girls dressed as boys, and identical twins. In this play, everyone is going to conceal himself in one way or another. Malvolio, a pompous servant, is going to conceal his true character to impress his employer. Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are going to conceal themselves behind a bush in order to watch Malvolio make a fool of himself. Sir Andrew is going to try to conceal his cowardice when baited into a duel with Cesario. And Viola, our heroine, is going to conceal her identity—
and
her sex,
and
her feelings—from Orsino, with whom she falls in love.

I prithee—and I’ll pay thee bounteously—

Conceal me what I am
,

and be my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent
.

Become
in this sentence means “be suitable to.” So the sentence means “Please, conceal me, and help me put on the kind of disguise that will be suitable to my intention, which is to serve the duke as his servant.” This is a tricky passage to memorize, and the keys are repetition and breaking it into four parts:

and be my aid

for such disguise

as haply shall become

the form of my intent
.

and be my aid for such disguise

as haply shall become the form of my intent
.

For this kind of rhythmic passage, your child should repeat the phrases until they become second nature, like the sections of a piano piece before a big recital.

Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent
.

I’ll serve this duke
.

The Issue of Realism

At this point in the play, at the end of Scene 2, Shakespeare has set himself up to pull off one of the greatest coups in all of theater: turning Viola into a young man. This brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s comedies, and as you teach your children about these plays, you’ll want to point this out again and again: Shakespeare’s comedies are filled with events and characters and plot twists that are
not
realistic. Disguises, mistaken identities, twins, cross-dressing, magic, gods and goddesses, coincidence, fairy sprites, concealments, ruses—all these devices abound in Shakespeare’s comedies.

• In no less than five of his fourteen comedies—
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night
,
and
Cymbeline
—women disguise themselves as men and fool everyone around them, including the men they love
.

• Two of his comedies
,
Twelfth Night
and
The Comedy of Errors
,
contain identical twins who are so much alike that they confuse other characters
.

•
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
The Tempest
contain magic
.

•
As You Like It
and
Cymbeline
include visits from gods
.

• In two comedies
,
All’s Well That Ends Well
and
Measure for Measure
,
the heroines pull the “bed trick”—that is, they spend a night in bed with the men they love while the men themselves believe that they are sleeping with other women
.

•
The Merry Wives of Windsor
involves a fat old knight named Falstaff who dresses up as a woman called the Witch of Brentford in order to fool the neighbors
.

• And in
The Winter’s Tale
,
a wife conceals herself from her husband for sixteen years, then poses as a statue that seemingly comes to life
.

Indeed, with only one or two arguable exceptions, all of Shakespeare’s comedies contain nonrealistic elements.

Why does Shakespeare do this? There is no simple answer. It is the way Shakespeare saw comedy in his mind and in his heart. It is the way he saw life. Interestingly, this extravagant form of comedy, which Shakespeare effectively invented out of whole cloth, has not been much imitated in the history of stage comedy. Most stage comedies in English since Shakespeare’s time have opted instead to try to be more “realistic.”

The way I raised this issue with my children was to talk about the sitcoms on television that they love to watch. These shows are generally set in living rooms or kitchens, and they involve people who are essentially like our neighbors next door. Think of the sitcom
Friends
, for example. It is set in apartments and restaurants and is affirmatively literal and nonmagical. In this respect, it resembles most of the stage comedies written since the seventeenth century—everything from Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
to Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer
to Noel Coward’s
Private Lives
. And these resemble most of the film and television comedies we’ve been watching from the early twentieth century to the present day—everything from
I Love Lucy
to
You’ve Got Mail
to
Seinfeld
. They are all part of a tradition called the “comedy of manners.” These plays, movies, and sitcoms rely on witty dialogue, topical references, and moment-to-moment situations for their action and laughs. Shakespeare’s comedies don’t do that. They are all romance and style. They are filled with fairy queens and shipwrecked twins, disguised tutors and ancient servants pursued by bears. Where the comedy of manners has closets filled with household conveniences, Shakespeare’s comedies have leprechauns dancing on the ceiling.

One of my favorite literary critics, Northrop Frye, put it this way in his book
A Natural Perspective:

In every [Shakespeare] comedy there is some explicitly antirealistic feature introduced: this feature forms a convention that we have to accept.… A doctor once remarked to me that he was unable to enjoy a performance of
Twelfth Night
because it was a biological impossibility that boy and girl twins could resemble each other so closely. Shakespeare’s answer, apparently, would be for drama what Sir Thomas Browne’s is for religion: “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough for an active faith.”

Once you have exhausted all the Shakespeare comedies, you’ll have to turn to other art forms for the same kind of nonrealistic comic experience. Children’s literature sometimes fills the gap (see
Peter Pan
and
Harry Potter
). So do some of the best of the “screwball” film comedies of the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s (e.g.,
Bringing Up Baby, To Be or Not to Be, The Major and the Minor
, and
Some Like It Hot
). And so do some of the classic American musical comedies (think of
Guys and Dolls
and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
).

The Comedy of Errors
at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Forbes Mason and Jonathan Singer
(photo credit 14.1)

More profoundly, we find the Shakespearean comic tradition lurking in the best Italian comic operas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which are masterworks. Rossini’s
The Barber of Seville
and
La Cenerentola
contain disguised heroes. Donizetti’s
The Daughter of the Regiment
involves a heroine raised by a platoon of soldiers; his
Don Pasquale
centers on a false marriage to a disguised heroine; and his
Elixir of Love
involves a supposedly magic potion. And Verdi’s
Falstaff
(based on
The Merry Wives of Windsor
) has a wooded grove haunted by a mythic hunter. Best of all is Mozart’s
The Marriage of Figaro
, which is the only stage work I can think of that rivals
Twelfth Night
for sheer comic brilliance.

Like Shakespeare, opera can seem a bit frightening if you haven’t grown up with it. But if you roll up your sleeves, and your children’s sleeves, and take a few minutes to listen to a little Rossini every now and then, your children will soon be humming opera tunes as easily as they’re reciting passages from Shakespeare.

The Invention of Modern English Drama

One aspect of Shakespeare’s genius that is difficult to see without being a scholar of sixteenth-century drama is the degree to which Shakespeare invented modern English drama, especially comedy. Prior to Shakespeare’s comedies, the English had only stage amusements like
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
and
Ralph Roister Doister
, perfectly fine little plays that made the audience laugh, but crude in construction and commonplace in language. Shakespeare changed everything, and he did it single-handedly and virtually overnight.

The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It
, and
Twelfth Night
are not only comedies of genius; they are filled with characters and situations that we recognize today and will recognize for all time. Shakespeare was able to see our lives and put them onstage, and he was the first English dramatist to do it. Indeed, he did it so profoundly that we soon began to imitate his characters as a way of defining ourselves. It is in this sense that Shakespeare (as the critic Harold Bloom puts it) “invented” us as modern humans.