[In the following essay, Garber argues that although no character introduced into a Shakespearean comedy ever dies, the knowledge that death molds and informs life is implicit in every one of them.]

I don't want to become immortal
through my work. I want to become immortal through not dying.

Woody Allen

It may seem perverse to argue that Shakespearean comedy is really about death and dying, but that is nonetheless what I should like to propose. More precisely, Shakespearean comedy is about the initial avoidance or displacement of the idea of death, the cognition and recognition of one's own mortality—and then, crucially, the acceptance, even the affirmation, of that mortality. In a sense, therefore, what we are speaking of is a process of neutralization, in anthropological terms a removing of the experience of death from a sacred to a neutral zone—a desacralization, a normalization, a refusal to privilege death. Shakespearean comedy is a ritual of the lifting of mourning, and the revels moment of applause that marks its close is the comic theater's counterpart to the shared feast of the mourner.

Let me explain. One significant hallmark of Shakespeare's comedies is that no character ever brought to life in them will suffer death by the play's close. There are numerous threats of death: Egeon is to die by sundown if he is not ransomed, Hermia to “die the death” or accept the living death of the nunnery if she refuses to wed Demetrius, Antonio to forfeit the pound of flesh, Claudio to die by Angelo's order. But none of these threats is fulfilled. Oliver, menaced at once by a snake and a hungry lioness, is rescued by his brother, Orlando, who happens to be passing by. Even Bottom-Pyramus, having elaborately dispatched himself with a sword thrust to the left pap, leaps to his feet a moment later to perform a Bergomask dance. In the romances real deaths occur: Mamillius dies in earnest, as does Antigonus, torn to pieces by a bear; Cloten is decapitated, his head thrown in the creek and washed to the sea. In the comedies, however, such dangers are always averted. In Measure for Measure the charming reprobate Barnardine is appointed to die in the place of Claudio, but even he is miraculously spared, his place taken by a hitherto unmentioned prisoner, Ragozine, whom we never see and who dies naturally, “of a cruel fever.”

Like Ragozine's, the deaths we do hear about in the comedies happen offstage, in a time-frame and space-frame adjacent to, but not within, the play. As Twelfth Night opens we hear that Olivia is mourning her brother, but we feel nothing of this death, and it soon becomes plain that Olivia's obsession with her brother is really a narcissistic obsession with herself. Ragozine, as a prisoner ex machina, undergoes a death ex machina that allows us to rejoice in the sparing of Barnardine. The “deaths” of Claudio and Hero are revealed as artifice, devices contrived to educate those who think they have killed them. Perhaps the most striking intrusion of an offstage death onto the playing space of comedy occurs at the close of Love's Labor's Lost, when the French messenger Marcade enters with the news of the death of the King of France. Visually, this scene must be extremely striking. The stage is crowded with brightly costumed figures: the “worthies” in their togas and swords, the lords and ladies in elegant court dress. To them, in the stark blackness of mourning Marcade enters—and becomes, as he does so, a visible memento mori, a reminder of death.

Indeed, in each of the comedies there is at least one memento mori, one character or speech that throws a dark shadow across the play, one reminder that all holiday is bounded by everyday—and that the ultimate truth of everyday is the reality of death. The bound Egeon is such a figure, framing the comedy with a visual emblem of mortality. The mechanics of farce, the mechanics of near-miss (as when the two Dromios stand one on each side of a door and speak to, but do not see, one another), is given a somber tinge by the ironic juxtaposition of the play's first two scenes. In Act 1, scene 1, we hear that Egeon needs a thousand marks to ransom him; in Act 1, scene 2 we learn that Antipholus of Syracuse has a thousand marks—but he does not even inquire about the identity of his imprisoned countryman, “a Syracusian merchant.” Such self-absorption, the play suggests, may lead to death—one's own or another's. The many images of binding, of rope's ends and marriage ties, that animate The Comedy of Errors, find their first and principal referent in the literally bound merchant; here marriage, comedy's traditional close, as the alternative to death.

As we have already seen, this is also true in the case of Hermia and, in a different way, of Olivia. In The Merchant of Venice the successful Bassanio, who wins the bride, is preceded by two unsuccessful suitors, each of whom, by choosing wrongly, condemns himself to celibacy and sterility—the forgoing of marriage and therefore of heirs. The golden casket actually contains a death's head—“a carrion death,” as Morocco calls it—and the verse it presents speaks of “gilded tombs” that “worms infold.” The traditional association of women's bodies with caskets or boxes, as pointed out by Freud and others, underscores the polarity of the choice: Morocco chooses death; Bassanio, sexuality, marriage, and life.

By the time of Measure for Measure, the covert has become overt, and the subject of death occupies the center of the play. In fact, the two kinds of “dying” have there explicitly become one; Claudio is to be executed for the sin of “dying” sexually with Juliet, and the sentence of decapitation is, again in Freudian terms, a symbolic castration. With this act of coming face to face with his subject, it may be noted, the playwright ceases to write comedies. The displaced subject of death, so agilely fended off by the masques and dances of the earlier comedies, is finally admitted to center stage. It will no longer be denied. The maddened Malvolio, the embittered Shylock, and the melancholy Jaques, who is “for other than for dancing measures,” reveal themselves as the other face of revelry and marriage, no longer contained, no longer containable, by the play. The Merchant of Venice ends in Belmont, but the audience's mind remains upon the shocking events in a courtroom in Venice. The play fails of closure; so does Measure for Measure. All's Well ends arbitrarily; it does not end well. The fool's song at the close of Twelfth Night does not close, either; it articulates the limits of comedy and feasting—it leads directly to that other fool, those other fools, on the heath.

Modern criticism of the comedies has relied to some extent upon concepts like Northrop Frye's “green world” and C. L. Barber's distinction between “holiday” and “everyday.” In anthropological terms both of these concepts are related to the threshold or portal ritual, as Arnold Van Gennep describes it in his seminal study The Rites of Passage (1908). According to Van Gennep, “the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and the sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (p. 20). For this reason Van Gennep offered an alternative series of terms for the progression of rites he had identified as separation, transition, and incorporation; he called them preliminal, liminal (or threshold), and postliminal rites. Such rites are themselves related to magico-religious ideas about zones of neutrality and zones of sacredness. Whoever passes from one zone or territory to another crosses a neutral area that corresponds to the door or portal.

The “green world” or world of holiday is in dramatic terms such a sacred territory—a privileged territory protected from the stresses and excesses of the diurnal—that is to say, of mortality. The winter wind in As You Like It blows only in a song; the unfaithful lovers cited by Lorenzo and Jessica in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice are only literary cliches, whose infidelity stands in strong contrast to the truth of love in Belmont. Adjacent to such worlds and sacred in a different way is the world beyond the grave—a world we see principally in the tragedies, through the ghosts of Old Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Banquo—a world to which Puck makes a brief allusion and which Claudio in Measure for Measure will imaginatively explore as he waits for death. Prince Hal passes from the one to the other in the course of Henry IV, Part 1, as he travels from the tavern to the battlefield, from a play world in which Hotspur kills six or seven dozen Scots before breakfast to a “real” world in which Hotspur himself becomes food for worms. In fact, in that play displacement operates directly and repeatedly. The confrontation of King and Prince is delayed until Act 3, scene 2, displaced by the mumming of Hal and Falstaff in Act 2, scene 4; the confrontation of Hal and Hotspur, Harry to Harry, so often anticipated, does not occur until the final moments of the play, displaced by comparisons and contrasts drawn by each of them, by the King, and by numerous other speakers; the rejection of Falstaff is postponed all the way to the end of Part II, displaced by Hal's “I do, I will.” Comedy holds death at arm's length, but cannot do so indefinitely. The undiscovered country must be discovered and explored.

The tensions implicit in Shakespearean comedy are tensions of willed ignorance followed by knowledge. Its holiday worlds are fevered and feverish, places of danger as well as of release, each one a golden casket concealing a death's head. The plays are full of dark moments. Proteus, wooing Silvia, claims that Julia is dead; she overhears him. His suit denied, he threatens Silvia with rape and is restrained by Valentine, who is conveniently by. Then Valentine, forgiving his friend, offers him “all that was mine in Silvia”; Julia faints away. Count Claudio, deceived by Don John, accuses Hero of infidelity; she swoons and is thought dead. Olivia's self-imprisonment in her chamber of mourning is matched and balanced by the forced imprisonment of her steward, Malvolio; he, like her, is a prisoner of self-regard. But Olivia crosses the threshold. Her marriage to Sebastian is, significantly, to be celebrated in a nearby “chantry”—that is, a chapel where priests perpetually chant masses for the souls of the dead. Marriage and death here coexist in the same space. Olivia's mourning has been displaced, not erased; perpetual mourning is a task for priests, not for sisters or marriageable young women. The chantry remains as a memento mori, an acceptance of death as intrinsic to the course of life.

“Die to live”; “seeking death, find life.” These are not mystical pronouncements, but eminently practical ones. Like Perseus' shield, Shakespearean comedy deflects the horrid visage of the Medusa that is each man's death and, in doing so, makes it possible for us not only to gaze upon it but to approach it. Shakespeare's comic characters must each gain an awareness of their own fragility, their own mortality. For Hermia and Helena in the wood, for Orlando and Oliver attacked by the lioness, the threat is present. For Berowne the entrance of Marcade with his message of death is succeeded by the ordaining of his own penance: “to move wild laughter in the throat of death.” Berowne himself complains against his play's lack of closure: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play.” That is the point. The acknowledgement of death beyond the privileged world of revelry enforces—requires—the failure of closure. There is always something else, something beyond. The precariousness of the world of Shakespearean comedy is intrinsic to its meanings. The plays are anchored, grounded, in the possibility of death—and in its certainty. The first is avoided, the second confirmed. The play itself becomes the portal. Just as its characters “play” at death and do not die, so the play plays with the idea of dying, lets us experience death imaginatively, as Claudio does—and escape it, as he does. All drama is displacement. Shakespearean comedy is in a sense a double displacement: fictive characters, fictive deaths. But the subject of death is there and will not be denied. It is the thing that does not happen, the thing that looms. The offstage deaths we hear about delimit the place of comedy: out there, they die; in here, we do not. But the knowledge of death, and its inevitability, the way in which it shapes and informs life, are essential to the workings of Shakespeare's comedies. Just as the tragic or threatening events presented in these plays are encapsulated in artifacts—songs, masques, plays within the play—so the plays themselves protect as they present, conceal as they confront, the fact of death.

My students occasionally claim that a play like As You Like It is “trivial”; they do not see the skull beneath the skin. They prefer the robust agonies of Romeo and Juliet, where the skull is on the table in plain view. But Shakespearean comedy is like a Dürer engraving, in which the loving couple, arm in arm, share the pictorial space with a little grinning death. It is he that gives meaning to their passion. Thus we hear that the Princess of France in Love's Labor's Lost had a sister who died of love. We are startled; the detail does not seem to fit. But it does fit—in fact, it is crucial, prefiguring both the entrance of Marcade and the tasks allotted to the suitors. Viola-Cesario invents a similar sister, who never told her love and pined away like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. The sister is a fiction, but she demonstrates a truth. Titania clings to the changeling boy for love of his mother, who once sat and gossiped with her on the sands; “but she, being mortal, of that boy did die.” There the antic sits, an undeclared, essential character in every comedy, awaiting his cue. In the development of Shakespearean drama his part grows larger and larger, until finally he transforms comedy from the thing it was—and leads the way to the darker genres of tragedy and romance.

Note

Like so many commentators on Shakespearean comedy, I am indebted to C. L. Barber's seminal study, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959). Other works that have influenced my thoughts on the plays include two that I admire as much for their methodology as for their particular perceptions: Sigurd Burckhardt's Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968) and Rosalie Colie's Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974). Other useful works on the comedies include Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974); Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965); David Young, The Heart's Forest (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972); and Larry S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970). John Hollander's essay, “‘Twelfth Night’ and the Morality of Indulgence” (Sewanee Review, LXVIII, [1959], reprinted in Alvin Kernan, ed., Modern Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970) has many interesting things to say about that play.

In matters art historical, I have gained valuable information and insights from Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, 4th Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955); Roy Strong, The English Icon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); and Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978).

Anthropological works that bear upon the subject include Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960—orig. pub. 1908); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).