The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

Sypher I rnr MEANTNcs oF coMDDy 59
Benedick's "recognition" is searching, for he has boasted, all along,
that he cannot find it in his heart to love any of Eve's daughters,
least of all Beatrice. And Beatrice, for her part, has avowed she will
never be fitted with a husband until God makes men of some other
metal than earth. Both these characters are too deep of draught to
sail in the shoal waters of sentimentalitv, and both have bravely laid
a course of their own far outside the matchmaking that goes easily
on in Messina. Each is a mocker, or eiron; but in being so, each becomes
the boaster (alazon) betrayed into the valiant pose that they
are exempt from love. Then they both walk, wide-eyed, like "proud"
Oedipus, into the trap they have laid for themselves. There they see
themselves as they are. When Benedick hears himself called hardhearted
he suffers the bewilderment of comic discovery and knows
that his pose as mocker is no longer tenable. So he turns his scornful
eye inward upon his own vanitv: if Beatrice is sick for love of his
ribald self he must give up his misogyry and get him a wife. He
yields himself, absurdly, to Beatrice, saying "Happy are they that
hear their detractions and can put them to mending." At the extreme
of his own shame Benedick is compelled to see himself as he sees
others, together along a lorv horizon. Thus occur the comic purgation,
the comic resignation to the human lot, the comic humbling of the
proud, the comic ennobling after an act of blindness. Those who play
a comic role, like Benedick or Berowne or Meredith's Sir Willoughby
Patterne, wrongheadedly are liable to achieve their own defeat and
afterwards must hide their scars. The comic and the tragic heroes
alike "learn through suffering," albeit suffering in comedy takes the
form of humiliation, disappointment, or chagrin, instead of death.
There is a comic road to wisdom, as well as a tragic road. There
is a comic as well as a tragic control of life. And the comic control
may be more usable, more relevant to the human condition in all its
normalcy and confusion, its many unreconciled directions. Comedy
as well as tragedy can tell us that the vanity of the world is foolishness
before the gods. Comedv dares seek truth in the slums of
Eastcheap or the crazy landscape f)on Quixote rvanders across or on
the enchanted Prospero isle. By mild inward laughter it tries to keep
us sane in the drawing room, among decent men and women. It tells
us that man is a giddy thing, yet does not despair of men. Comedy
gives us recognitions healing as the recognitions of tragic art. They
are sometimes revelations and come in the moonlit forest of a summer
night; then Bottom, with his ass head, is transformed to a Seer, a
Visionary, and Bottom's Dream is apocalyptic. For Bottom, the poor
weaver, reports: "I have had a dream; past the wit of man to say