The first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the First Folio of 1623, subdivided them into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, of which comfortably the largest section contained the Comedies. Originally, fourteen plays were placed in that category: in alphabetical order they are All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter's Tale. Pericles was not included in the First Folio at all, and Cymbeline was then regarded as a tragedy, but both would be considered comedies today. More recently, it has become common practice to present the so-called 'problem plays' and the four late 'romances' in separate lists, and this convention will be followed here, partly for convenience, and partly because such groupings help shed greater light onto Shakespeare's creative development. It is certain that most of the early comedies were written before 1600, and very likely that they all were, which places them firmly in the first half of Shakespeare's career - and it has been argued on various occasions that either The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew or The Two Gentlemen of Verona may be his very first play. One thing that immediately needs clarifying is that the term 'comedy' would have made a different impression on Shakespeare's contemporaries than it would make on present-day audiences: his aim was not primarily to make people laugh. While the comedies are certainly more light-hearted than the tragedies, they still probe dark emotional depths: witness Shylock's notorious "pound of flesh" bargain in The Merchant of Venice, or the soul-searching in Much Ado About Nothing when Claudio is confronted with the news that he may have caused the death of his innocent bride-to-be, or the fact that one of The Two Gentlemen of Verona ends up attempting to rape the other's betrothed. That said, they can be hilarious in the right hands: witness John Laurie and Ronnie Barker's Quince and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1971), Michael Elphick and Clive Dunn's Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About Nothing (1984), John Cleese's Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (1980) and Prunella Scales' Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982): the nods to Basil and Sybil Fawlty were almost certainly intentional. Both Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream culminate in deliberately disastrous stage productions, while The Comedy of Errors is based around the age-old plot device of mistaken identity, rendered doubly confusing by the 1983 BBC version's use of special effects to allow Michael Kitchen and Roger Daltrey to play two roles onscreen simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, it's the major masterpieces that have proven most popular in terms of British film and television adaptations. Twelfth Night is the winner in terms of numbers, followed closely by A Midsummer Night's Dream, though As You Like It holds the record for the number of big-screen films (three, with a fourth in production as of mid-2005), though the BBC Television Shakespeare's completist remit has ensured that even The Two Gentlemen of Verona has had one complete production. Much Ado About Nothing has been the biggest international hit, courtesy of Kenneth Branagh's star-studded 1993 film, and Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967) shrewdly capitalised on the popularity and offscreen reputation of its stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. While most productions have been set in Shakespeare's own era, exceptions include eighteenth-century (1985) and pre-WWII (2000) updates of Love's Labour's Lost, an As You Like It (1992) set on an East London housing estate, a Merchant of Venice (2001) set in the notoriously anti-Semitic 1930s, and a Twelfth Night (2003) that reflects contemporary multicultural issues, notably that of illegal asylum seekers. The Taming of the Shrew also inspired two 1930s comedies (You Made Me Love You, 1933; Second Best Bed, 1938) and a blank-verse sequel (The Tamer Tamed, 1956). Michael Brooke
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