• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5248 0

But what a transformation has been wrought in the original simple tale. Whereas Plautus concentrated on just a single thread of misunderstandings, culminating in the one reunion of the long-separated brothers, Shakespeare's version enriches this with such a tapestry of subsidiary themes and sub-plots that by the end he can present us with a positive cascade of additional unions and reunions. Ephesian Antipholus, the brother whose marital quarrel has lasted throughout the play, is reconciled with his wife. His twin, Syracusan Antipholus, has fallen in love with the wife's sister: so the play can end on the full resounding note of an impending wedding. Also reunited are the brother's two servants, another pair of identical twins who had been separated by the same shipwreck which parted their masters. In addition to all this the two Antipholuses are reunited not only with their long-lost father (whose life at the start of the play had been threatened and is now spared) but also with their equally long-lost mother, who makes a dramatic reappearance at the play's climax. Woven together at the end we thus see no less than seven different, deeply emotional unions or reunions (including that of an entire family), involving a group of people who had all previously been separated or divided from one another. The sense of a kind of cosmic gathering together of those who had been sundered and isolated could hardly be more complete.

It was really in his other early comedies, however, that Shakespeare began to explore that added dimension which was to extend the range of the plot in a way the classical world had not dreamed of.

In classical Comedy, it will be recalled, there had only been one central pair of lovers in a story, and their initial `pairing off' had already taken place before the story opened (or at least, in the later romances, in `the opening paragraphs'). We begin, in short, with a pair of already established lovers, and the chief problem of the story is to surmount some obstacle which has arisen - an unrelenting father or a quarrel - to the confirming of their union.

In plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labours Lost, however, we see something very significant happening. We no longer begin with a pair of established lovers. The focus has moved backwards, as it were, to an earlier stage of the process: to the wooing which brings the lovers together in the first place. At the start of the first of these two plays we meet the ill-tempered shrew Katharina who thinks no man good enough for her: and the story tells of how the hero, the imperturbable Petruchio, sets out to break her wilfulness, first to make her accept him as a lover and then to soften and tame her into a dutiful bride. In the second we see no fewer than four handsome young men, who have vowed to have nothing to do with women, being softened into breaking their vow when by chance they run into four attractive young women who, after an initial show of reluctance, finally accept them.

The main action of the story has thus shifted to the pairing off process itself; and in his two remaining early comedies Shakespeare takes this a crucial stage further. At least in The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost we are never in real doubt, once the action has begun, which young man is eventually going to end up with which young woman. But in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (based on an early sixteenth-century Italian romance), a further twist enters the plot. We begin with a pair of seemingly established lovers, Proteus and Julia; while Proteus's friend Valentine goes off to Milan and falls in love with the Duke's daughter Silvia. But then Proteus himself comes to Milan and also falls in love with Silvia. Thus both young men are now in love with the same young woman. Possessed by his new infatuation, Proteus then becomes a dark figure and proceeds doubly to betray his friend, by revealing to Silvia's father Valentine's plan to elope with her. Valentine is banished, leaving Proteus free to continue his wooing of the reluctant Silvia. The situation becomes