This Week Woody muses on the laughs and laments made possible by dramatic irony.
Before we get started a quick reminder about our Othello. You can support it here. It will be on at the CLF Art Cafe in the Bussey Building, Peckham 9th-21st August. Tickets will be on sale shortly, so you’d better be ready. You’ll have to be quick, like Zephyrus the Wind! Right, on with the post!
Hello. You see, we here at By Jove HQ are currently up to our trousers in Shakespeare (an experience I’d recommend – it’s delightfully tingly). Shakespeare abounds in misunderstandings. Some of them are accidental like in Romeo and Juliet. Some of them are deliberately orchestrated like in Othello. Some of them are ludicrously unbelievable like basically any of the comedies; the Bard’s farces are like sharks in that if they stop moving forward for any length of time they fall into trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I like this about them – high-energy silliness is to be treasured. One can’t help but imagine, however, Shakespeare’s editor setting a limit to how many characters are allowed to disguise themselves as the opposite gender in any given play.
The success of these plays’ misunderstanding depends on we the audience being let in on the gag. I mentioned last week that Richard III would feel a rather different play indeed had it not opened with Gloucester letting us know his intentions from the outset. Similarly the convoluted love-polygons of A Midsummer Night’s Dream only make us laugh because we know that they are a bit of faerie-orchestrated mischief. If we believed, as the lovers do, that these people were changing their minds on whom they loved merely on a whim the whole thing would come of as angsty and adolescent; instead of angsty, adolescent and highly mockably amusing.
Shakespeare has good precedent in this. Sophocles’ Oedipus The King only invokes the fear and pity so admired by Aristotle because the audience knows what Oedipus has done and towards what revelation his determined investigation is leading him. In Euripides’ Bacchae we know the handsome stranger is a god and can see Pentheus’ every action setting the trap which will spring on him by the play’s finale. Of course, Euripides being Euripides there are moments when this tragic ignorance is also played for laughs. You read the scene where Dionysus dresses Pentheus up as a woman and tell me it’s not meant to be funny.
Knowing more than the characters onstage (or screen, let’s not start being exclusive) appeals to us as audience members. It makes us feel cleverer than the characters. With comedy this feeling cleverer than a character gives us a safe, socially acceptable manner in which to engage in laughing at (not with) people lower than us. There are theories why human sense of humour has evolved in this way, but you can’t deny it is an impulse we have felt or observed. Laughing down at someone is seen as cruel so we try to repress the urge in our everyday lives. The magic of the performance space creates people, characters, at whom we can laugh without fear of repercussion, thus giving a release to the less nice parts of ourselves. Freudian analysis is quite fun when you give it a penis – I mean father! – I mean go! When you give it a go!
In tragedy knowing more than the characters is still a wonderful device, but for different reasons. Sophocles, as one could in Athens at that time, assumed his audience would be familiar with the myth of Oedipus – they knew how the story ends (hints: it’s an eye-opener). In the Bacchae Dionysus tells the audience who he is within the first minute of the play starting. When the Bard lays his scene in fair Verona it is the sixth line of the play that says ‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life’. We know how these plays end. Even if you hit the bar heavily in the interval you’ll still have a bit of an inkling, enough to at least mutter slurredly to yourself “That Jomeo and Ruliet … they’re not still together, are they?” We know how they end, but we hope we’re wrong. It is this hoping against hope, this thwarted desire for a happy ending, which contains the tragedy. It is our lament of ‘if only fate wasn’t so cruel’ which drives the catharsis. We see throughout the course of the play several places at which if the characters had said or done something differently, things could have all turned out so much better for everyone. But they didn’t, and things haven’t, and now I’m up in the cheap seats crying into my bag of chocolate buttons.
Fate is all well and good. But not all of the misfortunes of our favourite dramatis personae are caused by such divine whims. the ultimate tragedy lies in the same source as with fate; we can see where this train wreck is going but we can’t stop it. The way we get to the end point is different, more human and more satisfying. I think fate, you may or may not be surprised to know, is a load of rubbish. This doesn’t make much of a difference if the play in which fate is a device is well acted, but my disdain for the concept does reappear after the final bow when I think on what I’ve just seen. The tragic conclusion of Romeo and Juliet could be averted by one text message: ‘Yo, gonna pretend to be dead. Don’t panic when you see my corpse. CU L8R.’ More gripping by far are those tragedies which have human, comprehensible causes. Causes we could imagine setting things in motion in our own fate-lacking magicless lives.
Things kick off in Othello, I won’t spoil it for you if you’ve not seen it. The things that actually happen aren’t any worse than the other tragedies. What makes it so gripping is the knowledge that we could stop it if we could get Othello to listen to us about what we’d just seen. But we can’t. If we were to try we’d get escorted from the venue and told that spilling our gin and shouting ‘don’t listen to him, Othello. Iago’s a bastard!’ meant we were “ruining the show”.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
