Tragedy vs. comedy

THE ULTIMATE DEATH MATCH!

Okay. Not so much. But really, it's no contest. I don't think anyone would dispute that Shakespeare's tragedies are superior to his comedies (for some reason, whenever people talk about this, histories are only mentioned as a footnote, despite the fact he wrote ten of them, and you always get the one person who says about The Tempest or whatever, "but isn't that a romance?" and then you get a long discussion... that's not a bad thing, mind you, said discussions can be quite entertaining...). Of course, now that I've made such a sweeping generalization, someone's probably gonna argue that the comedies are, in fact, better than the tragedies. I'd love to see that. I'd love even more if someone would advance the notion that actually Shakespeare was best at writing history, since that's even more of a left-field position. My opinion, though, is that Shakespeare was pretty darn good at everything, but he was simply better at tragedy than the others.

However, there is a certain general bias that somehow tragedy constitutes High Art while comedy is just fodder for the masses or something. I wonder whether Shakespeare is somewhat responsible for this. I mean, look at his best-known plays. Hamlet. King Lear. Macbeth. Othello. Romeo and Juliet. The only comedy which has that degree of word-of-mouth recognition is A Midsummer Night's Dream. Could Shakespeare's status as the Best Playwright combined with the fact that the first plays of his people think of are tragedies lead to tragedy having an undue place at the pinnacle of Western storytelling? Or does it go back to the Greeks, or earlier?

Perhaps tomorrow I shall write about WHY I don't think tragedy is necessarily better than comedy. Stay tuned...

Is Shakespeare literature?

My answer: Yes and no.

Okay, so most of the time I'll respond to comments by commenting on the same post myself. However, in this case there's something I want to post, because my answer will sort of explain what mindset I'm approaching the plays with.

Grace wrote this a while ago as a comment to one of my Titus posts:

Titus is really one of those plays you have to see. or do. much like all of shakespeare. Definitely continue reading - just always keep in mind it's not a piece of literature, it's a work of living moving art. (... "art" being a loose term, in the case of Titus.)

Well, what's a play? Is a play literature? Obviously Shakespeare meant for his works to be performed on stage, and not to be read. Having said that, his works were published as words on a page within his lifetime, and if I can sit alone and read it, for me that's literature. What other definition of literature is there, other than a story which one reads?

According to Wikipedia (which as we all know is an incredibly reliable source...), Richard Monette once said that plays on the shelf are literature, whereas plays on the stage are theatre. I don't know what was the context in which he said that, but if he means what I think he means, that plays are both literature AND theatre (though not at the same time), then I entirely agree. I guess I just don't see how they can't be both.

I'm all for this sort of kumbaya come-together approach because while a good deal of my early exposure to Shakespeare was as literature (in the form of a book group which morphed into a Shakespeare group). Also, I come from a clan of English professors, so I sort of have that mindset built into me. However, I've always loved the theatre as well, and have acted in five of Shakespeare's plays. So the bottom line is, I love reading Shakespeare, I love watching Shakespeare, and I love acting in Shakespeare, and on a certain level I don't want to say that any one of those things is more valid than another, though I'd say that my enjoyment of a play slightly increases if I get to see it and greatly increases if I get to act in it (which is why you'll never hear me speak a bad word about Comedy of Errors, whatever its faults).

A play can be great theatre without being great literature, and it can be great literature without being great theatre. Shakespeare's plays happen to be both. But for the purposes of this blog, I'm going to mostly be forced to talk about Shakespeare as literature, since unfortunately all of Shakespeare's plays aren't running simultaneously in my corner of the universe. The little play inside my head which runs whenever I read a script will have to suffice. Though I might use this blog to praise/brutally-tear-to-pieces various Shakespeare film adaptations I see.

To make a long story short... I was too tired to read 2 Henry VI today so I decided to ramble philosophically instead. :-)