The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [87]
Above the line/below the line
A final very important aspect of Comedy which must now be introduced is again exemplified in The Winter's Tale. This is the way in which the process of regeneration in the story begins with the coming together of the two young lovers, Perdita and Florizel, in a socially humble setting, in another country, far removed from the darkened and divided world of King Leontes' court where we began.
If we turn from the comedies of Shakespeare to those of his later seventeenthcentury successor Moliere, the first thing which may strike us is how uncomplicated their stories are. We are almost back to the simplicities of the New Comedy. We may also be struck by how many of his plays are built round the same basic situation. Firstly, we see a father, the head of a household, who is in the grip of some foolish obsession. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme he is a rich tradesman and would-be social climber who wishes to pass himself off as a gentleman. In Le Malade Imaginaire he is a hypochondriac, with an exaggerated reverence for doctors. In L'Avare, taken straight from Plautus, he is a surly old miser trapped in his obsessive love for his money. In Tartuffe he is under the spell of the hypocritical religious fanatic who gives the play its name.
We then see this deluded paterfamilias cast in the role of selfish and unrelenting father. He has a daughter who is in love with some agreeable young man whom she wishes to marry. But for reasons directly stemming from his obsession, her father is opposed to the match and insisting that she marry some much less desirable person of his own choice: a nobleman, a doctor's nephew, a rich elderly friend, the appalling Tartuffe himself.
The fundamental situation of the play therefore is that we are presented with an impasse: on the one side stands the unyielding head of the household, in the grip of his dark obsession; on the other, cast under a shadow by his stern refusal to let them marry, are the young couple, representing life, hope and the way forward. The third ingredient is that, in each instance, a key part in breaking up the log jam, allowing the lovers to come together and life to flow again, is played by the paterfamilias's servants, the young couple themselves and even his wife. In other words a conspiracy is formed against his life-denying rule by all those around him whom he would regard as inferior, junior or subordinate. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme it is the blindly snobbish M. Jourdain's maidservant and his common-sensical wife who mastermind the ruse whereby the daughter's lover comes to ask for her hand in the socially dazzling disguise of `the Grand Turk' (thus winning Jourdain's acceptance before the disguise is thrown off). In Le Malade Imaginaire it is the maidservant who dresses up as another doctor to expose the charlatanry of Purgon, thus helping to free Argan from his obsession and paving the way to the union of the lovers. In L'Avare it is the young valet who, by stealing the old miser's cash box, finally puts paid to Harpagon's dark, meanminded scheme to marry off his two children to rich elderly friends. In Tartuffe it is Elmire, the wronged wife (aided and abetted by maidservant and young lovers) who stages the crucial assignation which exposes to her besotted husband Orgon what