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Can the Poetics of Aristotle Aid the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Comedies?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2015
Extract
Because the Poetics has had such importance for the theory and practice of tragedy, the loss of Aristotle’s thought about comedy is greatly to be lamented. The student of Shakespeare laments it all the more in that our understanding of the comedies has lagged behind that of the tragedies. This paper asks, however, to what extent the Poetics as extant can be usefully applied to the comedies of Shakespeare; and to what extent we can thereby remedy some deficiencies of comedy criticism. For instance, it is a strength of Aristotle that he does not flinch from stating the obvious: he extracts from the obvious something useful,or even fundamental. Contrariwise, the interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedies often flinches from the obvious, and falls in consequence into the supersubtle or the arbitrary. A return to the Poetics may therefore be of benefit when it recalls us to fundamentals.
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- Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1985
References
1 For instance ‘A middle is that which follows something else, and is itself followed by another thing’ (50b31). Reference is to the Greek text of Kassel, R.Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Liber (Oxford 1965).Google Scholar The translations are my own, based on the editions and commentaries I have used. These are: the edition of the Poetics by Lucas, D.W. (Oxford 1968);Google ScholarAristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. L. Golden, commentary by Hardison, O.B. Jr. (Englewood Cliffs 1968);Google ScholarRoss, W.D.Aristotle5 (London 1949);Google ScholarAristotle’s Poetics, translated with Introduction and Notes by Hutton, J. (New York 1982);Google Scholar and Olson, E.The Theory of Comedy (Bloomington, Indiana 1968).Google Scholar
2 I adopt the chronology of Chambers, E.K.William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford 1930),Google Scholar 1.270–1, with a few changes explained below as they occur.
3 Levin, RichardNew Readings vs Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago 1979), 104,Google Scholar offers beautiful specimens of such ‘heresies’ as ‘thematicism’, ‘historicism’ or the obsession with irony. Here is an ironist on the ending of Twelfth Night: ‘Perhaps as testimony to the precariousness of this union [Orsino’s with Viola], to the violence that can at any moment transform Orsino’s totalitarian commitment from love to hate, is the figure of Antonio, whose faithful, vigorous love has not, like Viola’s, been at last rewarded by Orsino’s grace. Antonio’s fate, we know, can become hers.’ We do not know Antonio's fate, but we do know that it can’t become hers.
4 I make no use of the Tractatus Coeslinianus. There is a dispute whetherthis compilation represents Aristotle’s treatment of comedy or rather an independent and unintelligent adaptation of his account of tragedy to comedy. See Cooper, L.An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (Ithaca, N.Y. 1922)Google Scholar for the former view and Russell, D.A.Criticism in Antiquity (London 1981) for the latter.Google Scholar
5 Hardison (above, note 1), 111.
6 We cannot, accordingly, consider here Aristotle’s few remarks specific to comedy.
7 Pye, H.J.A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle (London 1792), 174.Google Scholar Unfortunately Pye’s application of the Poetics to Shakespeare’s comedies is fitful and few have followed this early example further.
8 47a10, with the notes of Lucas (above, note 1), 53; and Olson (above, note 1), 48.
9 Lucas (above, note 1), 107–8 on 50b8.
10 Ross (above, note 1), 286.
11 The sources of the comedy are conveniently studied in Bullough’s, G. edition of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 1 (London 1964).Google Scholar They are discussed by Bullough and in Brown’s, J.R.Arden edition of the Merchant (London 1955);Google Scholar also by myself in ‘The Merchant of Venice and Il Pecorone, or Can Source-Study Resolve the Question of Shylock?’, AUMLA 40 (1973), 271–83.
12 2.8.35. Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, Textual Editor G. Blakemore Evans (Boston 1974).
13 The finale seemed weak to Henry Pye (above, note 7) precisely on Aristotelian grounds.
14 51a12, 51b9, 52a20, etc.
15 Pye (above, note 7) 197.
16 Chapter 13, especially 53a27–39.
17 See Lucas (above, note 1), 126, 172 and 227–8; and 52a4, 54a4, 55a17, 60a2.
18 I am convinced by Stanley Wells’s arguments that The Two Gentlemen is earliest of all the comedies. These arguments are dramaturgical: the dearth of complex scenes and cross-arguments, the number of scenes for only two characters. The Comedy of Errors, by contrast, is more dramaturgically inventive, therefore placed third after The Shrew, whose plot it borrows. See Wells, S. ‘The Failure of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 99 (1963), 161–73.Google Scholar
19 Especially Twelfth Night, in ways examined by Jenkins, H., ‘Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night’, Rice Institute Pamphlet 45.4 (1959), 19–42.Google Scholar
20 The dating of The Merry Wives is uncertain. I place it here in order to keep Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night together as the group which everyone agrees they are.
21 The finale is not discussed here, since it hinges hardly at all on anagnorisis or peripeteia, and achieves little ekplexis.
22 ‘As You Like It’, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), 40–51.
23 The phrase is Kevin Magarey’s, used in the Humanities Research Centre Conference on Shakespeare’s Comedies, 1976.
24 The debts of Twelfth Night to Errors are discussed by Salingar, L.G. ‘The Design of Twelfth Night’, Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958), 117–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Did Shakespeare know the Poetics? If he did, that would suggest other and firmer foundations for my enquiry. He refers to Aristotle by name twice, both times in connection with the writings on ethics (The Taming of the Shrew 1.1.32 with 18–20, and Troilus and Cressida 2.2.165–7). He refers to ideas which occur in Aristotle’s writings on science, but these are more likely to have caught his eye (or ear) in other people’s repetitions of Aristotle. The nearest I have found to a reference to the Poetics is Polonius’s ‘scene individable, or poem unlimited’ (Hamlet 2.2.399–400). But this may not refer to the unity of place after all; and even if it does, it implies acquaintance with the three unities as fathered on Aristotle rather than with the actual words of the Poetics. True, others of Shakespeare’s time knew the work, and apparently in the Greek as well as in translations since Sidney expressly talks about the Greek of Chapter 9 in his Apologie for Poetrie of 1583. And it is next to impossible to prove a negative. Nonetheless, without getting into arguments about the depth or otherwise of Shakespeare’s learning in general (‘small Latin and less Greek’, said Ben Jonson) the probability is that he did not know the Poetics. But this does not prevent his practice, like that of the Greek dramatists whose work Aristotle analyses, from obeying the principles to be elicited from the abiding nature and demands of drama.