What's Funny About Shakespeare's Comedies?

Sep 26, 2011
Samantha Markham

Shakespeare, The Chandos Portrait (1610) - National Portrait Gallery

Shakespeare wrote seventeen comedies, but are any of them actually funny?

During his career, Shakespeare penned seventeen plays that were classified as comedies, fifteen of which were published in the First Folio.

Some of these have since been labelled ‘problem plays’, because they simply don’t fit comfortably in the genre, but neither do they belong to the tragedy or history genres.

According to the original categorisations, Shakespeare’s comedies were listed as follows:

All’s Well That Ends Well
As You Like it
The Comedy of Errors
Cymbeline
Love’s Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merchant of Venice
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (not printed in the First Folio)
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentleman of Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen (not printed in the First Folio)
The Winter’s Tale

The four that would later come to be regarded as ‘problem plays’ are: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Merchant of Venice. But even if we exclude these plays from the equation, are any of the Shakespearean comedies actually funny?

What is a Shakespearean Comedy?

Well, part of the reason many people fail to find humour in Shakespeare’s comedies is that a Shakespearean comedy is something quite different from what we now consider comedy. In fact, it’s quite different from any other form of Shakespearean play, as the genre does not have strict parameters and factors that distinguish it from others, which is the reason a good proportion of these plays are now regarded as problematic in terms of categorisation.

Some of Shakespeare’s comedies blur the line between comedy and tragedy, and have been subsequently named tragic-comedies by some critics and scholars. For example, Much Ado About Nothing, which is not listed among the ‘problem plays’ ends with Hero faking her death. In this sense, the play has more in common with Romeo and Juliet than it does with The Comedy of Errors.

What Factors Make up a Shakespearean Comedy?

Having said that there is no strict form to a Shakespearean comedy, which is undeniably true, there are some common themes found in many of the plays, which can help identify them as comedies.

Love: The theme of love is prevalent throughout Shakespeare’s comedies, and not just the ones that later came to be known as ‘romances’; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale. In particular, Shakespearean comedies deal with the struggle of young lovers to be together, often at the opposition of elders, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The plays end with the unity (marriage) of these lovers.

Confusion (often as a result of mistaken identity): The instances of mistaken identity in Shakespeare’s comedies are rife from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night. Often this kind of confusion, results in humour that modern audiences can appreciate, such as the slapstick of the unjust beatings that the Dromio twins receive.

Labyrinthine plots: In many of Shakespeare’s comedies the emphasis moves away from character and onto plot, causing complex and, at times, convoluted twists and turns. The shift of focus away from the character is deliberate, as it detaches the audience and enables them to laugh at a character’s misfortune, rather than sympathise with their woes.

What Styles of Comedy Does Shakespeare Use?

There are a great many styles of humour used throughout Shakespeare’s comedies: Practical jokes (for example the trick played on Malvolio in Twelfth Night), puns, slapstick, bawdy comedy (such as the title of Much Ado About Nothing, ‘nothing’ being a euphemism for a part of the female anatomy), dry humour, pithy banter (found in abundance throughout The Taming of The Shrew), satire and earthy humour.

There are many funny moments in Shakespeare’s comedies. Unfortunately, there are two fundamental reasons that much of the humour is lost on modern audiences. Firstly, the vast majority of his comedy is wordplay, which, for many non-Shakespeare fans simply doesn’t fair well in translation. Secondly, much of his humour was directed at late 16th and early 17th century audiences, with jokes that were relevant to their London-based Elizabethan or Jacobean lives.

That said, Shakespeare’s comedies are still funny and offer a lot of humour to audiences around the world. After all, slapstick is timeless and witty wordplay is still, and will always, create laughter for Shakespeare lovers.