The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [88]
In fact this aspect of Moliere's plays whereby the road to resolution lies through the `inferior' figures in the story was by no means new in Comedy. Again and again, right back to Aristophanes, we see the characters in a comedy separated by, as it were, an unspoken dividing line. The characters above the line, like Moliere's fathers and their friends, represent the established order, an upper social level, the authority of men over women, fathers over their children. Those below the line, where the shadows fall, include servants, people of inferior class, wives and the rising generation. The chief source of darkness in the story, opposed to life, is on the upper level. The road to liberation lies through the `inferior' level. In The Wasps it was young Anticleon who liberated his grim old father from his obsession with passing judgement. In Lysistrata it was the heroine and her fellow-wives who liberated their men from their ruling obsession with war. In the Epitrepontes it was the slaves to the various parties who, in a kind of below stairs conspiracy, got together to work out the identity of the newly-found baby, thus bringing love and reconciliation back to their master and mistress in the `upper world'. Indeed for the slaves to be responsible for sorting out the confusion which had engulfed their social superiors was a regular feature of the New Comedy.
When we come to Shakespeare we almost invariably see a division into an upper' and a `lower' world in social terms, and it is even occasionally servants or others on the lower level, as in Much Ado, who expose the vital truth which eventually brings about the triumph of love on the upper level. But much more often as we have seen, the same result is achieved by characters from the social upper level who move onto a shadowy, `inferior' level in a different way, by concealing their true identity beneath a disguise. The essence of Comedy is always that some redeeming truth has to be brought out of the shadows into the light. This often requires a temporary descent into some obscured or `inferior' state in order that the truth maybe established, and the retreat behind a disguise is one of the most obvious ways in which this is achieved (e.g., Julia and Viola disguising themselves as pages, Rosalind as a poor country boy, the rich heiress Portia as a comparatively humble lawyer). Another form of `descent' is into some shadowy `other world, just as the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream cannot get themselves sorted out without their descent into the twilit world of the forest and the `inferior' kingdom of the fairies; or the various light characters in As You Like It without their descent into the shadowy world of the Forest of Arden. The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level, or in some other place beyond the consciousness of the `upper world' character or characters who are in the grip of their life-denying state. It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world again, just as happens when Leontes is at his lowest ebb of spiritual exhaustion after the attack of darkness which dominates the first three acts of The Winter's Tale. The quickening of new life begins far away, amid the socially inferior surroundings where the young lovers are disguised as shepherds, until it eventually sweeps back up to the `sick' King Leontes' court to turn winter into spring.
Late eighteenth-century comedy
We can see a number of variations on this complex but extremely important aspect of Comedy in the memorable constellation of comedies which appeared in various European countries in the 1770s. For instance, in Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer (1773) we see an upper class young hero Marlow, who has a problem. He cannot relate to women unless they are of a lower station than his own.