Abstract

This paper examines the Private and public calamity shook the world in which Shakespeare lived. The death of Queen Elizabeth, plague, the dissolving of the London theaters, and the beginning of civil war influenced Shakespeare’s writing in complex ways. Some of his earlier ideas were abandoned, but a tragic view of human deeds and his chaotic world prevailed even in the comedies. The tragedies too, often great in scope and grandeur, took love’s difficulties more seriously.
Shakespeare’s comedies are comic partly as they insist on love’s difficulties. The tragic view of human deeds is there even in the comedies. Like the tragedies, the comedies empathize with the lower classes hurt by fate, and pity is aroused. Very tragic events can befall fools. Fortune’s wheel is a medieval idea of fate spinning mankind to and fro between prosperity and calamity. Even for the great, fortune’s gifts were meager. The providential time scheme of the comedies presupposes God’s plan hidden temporally from men. World and men’s deeds seem absurd.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s comedies preeminently comic, not tragic. The comic view, present also in the tragedies, prevails. Catastrophes are averted, love is victorious, and laughter triumphs. The abject fools are anywhere in commedia. Even in the tragedies, stupidity and folly abound. In Cleopatra’s grand tragedy, despair is ridiculous and death absurd. Tragedy is serious but parodic. A mock tragic view is parodic Shakespeare’s other parodic tragedies. Fooling parodies the tragic and serious view of the world. It is tragic as death parodies life and the tragic view of life. Fooling triumphs as life, laughter, and comic victory in the end. Life unexamined and laughter abound.