The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [101]
Both these stories bring out with unusual subtlety a theme which had lain near the heart of Comedy ever since it first became centred on a pair of young lovers, as indeed it lies at the heart of so many other types of story: the handing on of the torch of life to a new generation. We see a ruling order which has become corrupt and out of touch with life, so often represented by the `unrelenting parent' and here by Beckmesser and by the decadent aristocrat Ochs. We then see appearing in its shadow the seeds of new life, in the burgeoning love of the young hero and heroine; until eventually one or both are raised up from the shadows of the 'inferior realm', so that the story can end with them at last united centre stage. The transition to a new, healthy order, holding out hope for the future, is complete.
But if this is one of the most serious themes near the heart of Comedy, in the forty years between Die Meistersinger and Der Rosenkavalier the Comedy plot had swept into a new age of popularity on the European musical stage, in a form where the serious element in the story had been all but lost sight of. In Offenbach's Paris, Strauss's Vienna, Gilbert and Sullivan's London, this was the heyday of `comic opera' or operetta. And here we suddenly see all the familiar ingredients of the plot being played with, in a way which seems simply like a burlesque of the traditional form.
Stories such as those of Strauss's Die Fledermaus (1874) and The Gypsy Baron (1885) are perfectly shaped by the pattern of the Comedy plot, and crowded with every sort of traditional device: disguises, assignations where the heroine is confused with another woman, startling revelations of true identity (including in The Gypsy Baron the discovery that the gypsy heroine is in fact a princess, in Die Fledermaus that a mysterious Hungarian princess is in fact the heroine), and so forth. But in a way not true of Comedy before, there is never any intention that we should look for a serious message in the story. It is as if the medium of the Comedy plot, with all its familiar conventions, has itself become the only message.
These conventions were even more obviously caricatured in the contemporary British equivalents of Viennese operetta, the `comic operas' of Gilbert and Sullivan. In The Pirates of Penzance (1880), for instance, the entire female chorus, the daughters of a major-general, fall in love with the male chorus, a gang of pirates. The major-general not unnaturally assumes the role of `unrelenting father, pleading that he is an orphan and cannot let his daughters go, since they are the only joy left to him; but the pirates eventually emerge in their true identity as noblemen in `inferior disguise, so the old soldier is only too happy to relent. In HMS Pinafore (1878) the hero, a humble seaman, falls in love with his captain's daughter, the heroine, who is also being wooed by the pompous, self-important Sir Joseph, `ruler of the Queen's navee'. Eventually it is revealed that the hero and the captain had been switched as babies, so, highly improbably, they are now switched back again. The hero becomes a captain and the captain a humble seaman. Obviously the First Lord of the Admiralty cannot marry a mere seaman's daughter, so hero and heroine can at last be united.
This burlesquing of the Comedy plot was carried over to the non-musical stage in plays such as those of Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) shows us two heroes, Jack and Algernon, a pair of rich and single upper-class young men. Jack, who when he is in London for some reason unexplained calls himself Ernest, wishes to marry the beautiful Gwendolen. But there is a formidable obstacle in their way in the shape of her fearsome mother Lady Bracknell who, as `unrelenting parent, is refusing to allow the match. Algernon then discovers that his friend Jack is acting as guardian to a