Classifying Shakespeare's Comic Heroes

Classifying Shakespeares Comic Heroes

Shakespeare drew so many different comic heroes that to try to classify them would be an impossible task however for the sake of economy we can consider most Shakespeares comic heroes would fit into any of the three following groupings, that of the boaster, the fool or the scoundrel.

According to most critics the greatest among all the great characters Shakespeare ever drew are Hamlet, Shylock and Falstaff. As the subject of this essay is the classification of Shxs comic heroes, Falstaff is the one that concerns us at the present time. Falstaff has been described as an alazon type, a boaster, an impostor. In The Meanings of Comedy Wylie Sypher following Arists reasoning in the chapter of his Ethics dedicated to the truth, defines comedy as a struggle (agon) in which the alazon or impostor, who claimed more than his share of the victory, was brought to confusion by the eiron or ironical man, who pretended ignorance. (The alazon is a boaster who claims more than a share of the & victory). And this can be seen in Henry IV, Pt 1, Act 2, sc. 4, 160-265 (190-280) Show the scene in which he boasts of / about having killed X number of people.). As we have just seen Falstaff claims to have been fighting with an ever increasing number of enemies while Hal pretends not to know anything about it. As soon as Falstaff begins to talk and notices he is listened to he grows himself up and starts swelling his lies upt to the point that his two rogues in buckram suits become eleven. (as Maurice Charney has pointed out) Falstaff is a comedian and great talker and he is never at a loss for words (64), because once he realizes everybody knows the truth / he has been taken in / he pretends he was in the know from the first moment. Because as Charney says Falstaff always maintains his & resourcefulness. Falstaff is not only an entertainer and a comic philosopher, he is also an indispensable spokesman for & life values (64)). Because more than any other Shxs hero /character Falstaff represents todays values. Falstaff will always choose life. We have only to remember that Prince Hal before the battle tells Falstaff Thou owest God a death (v.1.126), but Falstaffs soliloquizes that (quote): ´Tis not due yet and goes on expressing his philosophy of honour.

entre myself on the two extremes of the whole range /spectrum of fools that Shx designed: the wise or smart fool and the extremely stupid. The wise fool would be the one that Sypher calls the natural fool, whose mission was to divert the wrath of the gods from the anointed figure of the king (Sypher 39), that would help to explain why in King Lear the fool is the one to be hanged, if we take Lears words in the final scene as applied to his Fool also, not only to Cordelia. But if in tragedy the Fool was the scapegoat, the one to suffer the wrath of the gods, he was also the only one aloud to speak his mind. We have only to remember that in King Lear, Lear doesnt accept the slightest piece of disagreement or criticism. Lear was capable of disowning his dearest daughter and exiling his most loyal knight only because they asked to reconsider, while he accepts the whole truth from the Fools mouth and in spite of his continues threats about the whip, he never uses it on him, as one critic has pointed out. Contrary to what happens in tragedy in Shxs comedy the Fool is never punished and he is always in good standing with his master as it happens in act I, scene 5 of TN when Olivia defends Feste, her clown, from Malvolios criticism: There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail (94-95). This is the smart fool, the one capable to disarm / put down his opponent with his witticisms.

On the other extreme of the spectrum there was the extremely foolish, the simpleton. It is difficult to tell if Shakespeare enjoyed that type of humour or if he created these silly characters as a concession to the gallery, to the less cultivated part of the audience. Some of the punning and witty exchanges in Shakespeares plays are so elaborated that we readers or viewers without the help of many of those footnotes wouldnt be able to understand, and this critic cannot believe that in Shakespeare time the whole audience caught the meaning of each one of the hundreds of witticisms Shakespeare used in every play /understood every single piece of witticism. And I like to believe that, not only for the sake of relieving tension, but also because Shakespeare took into account every member of his audience and tried to please or to give something to laugh about to each one of them. That would explain why he retorts to that kind of universal humour once and again. Shakespeare used many of these simpletons especially in his comedies, and of those I am going to focus on the mechanicals in MSND, described by Philostrate as Hard-handed men that work in Athens here / Which never laboured in their minds till now (V.i.72-73). The humour of this type of characters relies mainly on the use of malapropisms. So for Bottom a lion is a wild-fowl, or he chooses to say obscenely (I.2.100) when seemly would be a more proper word, and we should take into account / mention also in this very scene, the mechanicals (stupid) idea that the audience would believe them to be the roles they are playing of. As for ex. Bottoms request that Snug the joiner tell the audience he is really a man and not a lion in order not to make the ladies afraid (MSND 3.1.38-43), or their confusion of the senses, especially on Bottoms scriptural parody, on awakening after what he believes it was a dream: