The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [82]
If we have the sense that, in some important respect, Comedy is here at last coming into its own in a form in which we have known it ever since (incidentally giving rise to the most incomprehensible form of literature ever devised, the plotsummary of any play or comic opera based on a'love tangle'), this is underlined by the last of Shakespeare's early comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, where we see the same kind of tangle handled with the effortless ease which showed him arriving at his full maturity as a storyteller.
When the story opens we meet two young men and two young women in a state of intense misery and confusion. The two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same young woman, Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander and wishes to marry him, but her `unrelenting' father Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius. Her friend Helena, on the other hand, loves Demetrius but is not loved in return. The foursome then enters the mysterious `wood near Athens, where the fairy king Oberon and his mercurial agent Puck get to work sorting things out. But the first result of their enchantments is only to make things worse. By bungling his magic, Puck not only manages to persuade Demetrius to transfer his affections to Helena, but Lysander as well. This leaves Hermia loved by no one, and Helena convinced that all three must be playing a trick on her. Everyone is now at odds with everyone else. All that is required for a happy resolution, however, is for Puck to arrange that Lysander to switch his love back to Hermia. This leaves Demetrius loving Helena, who now accepts that his affection is genuine. The two couples, at last properly paired off, can emerge from the forest to join Duke Theseus and Hippolyta in the joyful prospect of a triple wedding.
What is new about this sort of dizzying merry-go-round is that so much of the story may now be taken up not just with how the lovers can be brought together, but in sorting out the even more basic question of who should end up with whom. In other words, compared with the simple formulae of the classical world, which were solely concerned with the pitfalls which may await lovers after they have established their love, Comedy has now been opened up to include all the possibilities for confusion which may arise before their final pairing off. On the one hand this may simply consist of the uncertainties attending the initial wooing of two lovers, as they first come to terms with their love and learn to accept each other. On the other, it may also include all the vastly greater complications which can arise when love proves inconstant or one-sided, such as when one person's love for another is initially unrequited; or when a lover begins by loving one person, then switches to another (and not infrequently back again); or when two men are in love with the same woman; or two women with the same man. What has happened, in fact, is that the range of Comedy has been extended, not just by Shakespeare, but in Renaissance literature generally, to include virtually every combination and permutation possible in the human experience of love. Its potential for confusion has, in effect, been made complete. As a result we can begin to see more clearly than ever before the true nature of the Comedy plot.
Comedy: a first summary
What we are looking at when confronted by a fully developed Comedy is not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. By the time a jigsaw is complete, it seems obvious that there is only