The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [84]
Volpone is thus scarcely an example of Comedy, as we have been looking at it. The dark figures do not go through any change of heart as a prelude to the resolution. They are merely held up to ignominy and bundled off stage. Equally, there is no sense, as their dark powers are overthrown, of a whole community emerging from the shadows, joining together in joyful celebration round the loving union of a hero and heroine. Almost all Jonson's characters are shown as self-centred and dark. The focus of the story is entirely on how their greed, vanity, folly and deceit are finally exposed. In The Alchemist Jonson similarly shows a bunch of rogues, led by the cunning and cheeky Face, conspiring to trick various gullible fools into parting with their money, using as their headquarters the house of Face's master Lovewit during his temporary absence from London. Again the conspirators are eventually caught out, when Lovewit unexpectedly returns; although this time they escape punishment, partly because Lovewit lives up to his name by showing indulgent admiration for his servant's ingenuity; and partly because Face persuades him to accept one of the victims, the rich widow Pliant, as a wife. At least the play thus ends with a vestige of the conventional happy ending, as Lovewit and Pliant are happily brought together. But this final image of an impending marriage scarcely marks the triumphant resolution of everything the play has been about. It is merely tacked on at the end as a convenient device to round off the story.
Compared with the many-layered complexities of Shakespearean Comedy, the Jonsonian versions, by concentrating on just one aspect of the complete story, are little more than caricatures of the darker side of human nature. The glory of Shakespeare's comedies is not just that he so joyfully brings out the positive aspect of this plot, but how they may be read as a kind of anthology of almost every variation the plot can offer. He constantly reshuffles the same basic situations and motifs in every conceivable combination, shedding light first on one aspect of the plot, then on another. From the middle of his career, however, we see a remarkably consistent pattern emerging.
In what are often called the `Middle Comedies' - The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night - we are introduced to a group of characters, including a central pair of lovers who meet shortly after the story's opening. To begin with things go reasonably well, seeming to promise hope for the future. But then a threatening shadow intrudes: and at the heart of the story a particular opposition opens up between two of the characters. At one pole there is the play's chief dark figure, hard, bitter and vengeful; at the other is the heroine, who spends some crucial part of the story, particularly when the dark powers are most in the ascendant, in disguise: hidden, as it were, from complete view. Thus obscured, the loving heroine becomes the chief touchstone of the story, in one of two ways. Either from behind her disguise, she plays an active and dominant role in bringing about the play's resolution, in which case she is disguised as a man (Portia as the lawyer Dr Bellario, Rosalind as Ganymede, Viola as Cesario); or she is cast in a more passive role as the story's chief victim, passing into eclipse like Hero in Much Ado, when she is first taken for dead and then reappears at the end disguised as her cousin. Shakespeare often employed disguises in his earlier comedies, but only once, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, had it been the heroine who adopted a disguise. Now his heroines do it consistently. And only as part of the general resolution and the routing of the dark powers does the heroine reappear in her proper identity: