The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [80]
Easily the best-known (and least sensational) of these forerunners of the many novels and romances which in later times were to be based on the Comedy plot is Longus's Daphnis and Chloe. This begins with the discovery by shepherds on a country estate of two babies, each accompanied by tokens. The mere mention of such tokens, a device originally found in mythology and long preceding Comedy, of course signals that the resolution of the story will eventually hang on the discovery of the babies' true identities. The boy Daphnis and the girl Chloe are each adopted by a shepherd family. They grow up together in pastoral innocence, fall in love and from then on the entire suspense of the story lies in how they can overcome a long series of obstacles to their final union. First, each of the two are abducted in turn by a different set of kidnappers, and manage to escape. Then Chloe's parents advertise for a rich suitor for her hand, which seems to rule out the impoverished Daphnis - until he is told in a dream where to find the money necessary to win their approval. He does so and halfway through the story it seems as though the couple are about to get married. But then, just as in a Rags to Riches story (there is a strong Rags to Riches flavour about this tale), a'central crisis' intervenes. The son of the rich owner of the estate arrives from the city, and Daphnis's foster-parents seize this opportunity to produce the tokens found with him as a baby. To the astonishment and delight of everyone except Daphnis and Chloe themselves, it is discovered that Daphnis is the estate owner's long-lost son. The lovers are heartbroken, because it seems they are about to be torn apart forever. Daphnis cannot now marry a mere shepherd girl. But just before the hero is taken away to the city to begin his grand new life, Chloe's foster-parents have the bright idea of producing her tokens, which seem to indicate that she may also be of high-born origin. She too joins the party for the city, where the estate owner holds a feast for all the richest men in town. Sure enough, when Chloe's tokens are handed round, the richest guest of all recognises that she must be his long-lost daughter. Thanks to the discovery of their true identities (a rare instance of both parties turning out to be of nobler birth than had been supposed), all obstacles to the union of the overjoyed couple have at last been removed.
With this delicately symmetrical essay on the importance of discovering who you really are as a precondition to living happily ever after, the classical world more or less bade farewell to the theme of Comedy. The third and final stage in the evolution of the plot was not to unfold for well over a thousand years.
Stage three: Shakespeare
Although the Comedy plot by no means disappeared from Western storytelling during the Middle Ages (whose most famous poem, after all, was explicitly given the name of `Comedy'), it was not until the conscious revival of the classical tradition in the pastoral romances and stage comedies of the Renaissance that it swept back to its earlier prominence. When it did so, an extremely important new dimension began to be added to the story which, in a sense, made the plot complete. Nowhere can we see this more clearly illustrated than in the 16 comedies of Shakespeare (nearly half his dramatic output), who did more to explore the full range of the archetypal comic plot than any author before or since.
The first thing which may strike us when we look at the early comedies of Shakespeare after those of the classical world is how much richer and more complex their stories have become: like the textures of Renaissance polyphony after the single-line melodies of plainsong. We can see this particularly vividly in what was probably his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, because we can contrast it directly with Plautus's Menaechmi, on which it was based.