COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 29green-world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual themes of thetriumph of life and love over the waste land’ (Frye, 1990:182). The‘green world’ is a phrase widely taken up by Shakespeare criticism as itoffers a convincing template for the symbolism of the narrativestructure of his comedy. ‘Green worlds’ are wish fulfilment locations,always rural, often enchanted, in which the normal business of the townis suspended and the pleasurable pastimes of holiday prevail.Shakespearean green worlds include the wood outside Athens in AMidsummer Night’s Dream, the coast of Illyria in Twelfth Night (1601–02), Portia’s Belmont in The Merchant of Venice (1596–97), and theForest of Arden in As You Like It (1599). Associated with love, leisure,levelled social hierarchy, and play, the green world serves as a space inwhich solutions to urban problems can be worked through. As court orcity rules no longer apply, gender distinctions can be disregarded, themythical and the quotidian can intermingle, and drunks and braggartsare able to live freely away from the tyranny of work or the regime ofthe clock. In order to solve the problems of the town, represented by a‘blocking agent’, usually a father figure or envoy of the older generationwhose blind insistence on his authority forbids the success ofrelationships founded on love, society must be divested of its mostfundamental suppositions, such as the nature of law, or the relationshipbetween the sexes, in order that those suppositions may be reconstructedin the form of a happy ending. Immersion in the green world isimmeasurably healing, but always temporary; holiday is defined only assuch because it must be distinguished from the everyday world. In thenarrative of As You Like It, says Frye, Rosalind is the representative ofspring, inspiring renewal in the dormant inhabitants of Arden andultimately triumphing over the cruel and unforgiving winter of DukeFrederick. Through her intervention, made possible by her entry into theforest, the unlawfully usurped Duke Senior is reinstated, reconciliationsare brought about, and, after a round of divinely sponsored weddings,society is rejuvenated with the promise of a new ruling generation andtheir heirs.Frye’s account is both convincing and symmetrically satisfying, butit brings with it two key objections. The first is the extent to whichcomedic structure is privileged over content, the degree that hisdiscussion of varied and distinct plays can become a list of titles whosesimilarity rests on their final reconciliations. This is a shortcoming of allstructuralist and narratological critical practices, and in mitigation itshould be noted that Frye’s project aims to study structural similaritiesand not offer close readings of individual texts. However, through the